cover #2 katerina jebb

UNDERGROUND PRESS

Artist Katerina Jebb is not a photographer in the conventional sense. She doesn’t use a camera, but instead a flatbed scanner — a semi-obsolete device from the early digital era — to produce detailed, life-sized images of bodies, fashion, archival objects, and printed matter. Her process radically redefines photography: the image is not captured in an instant, but scanned slowly, line by line, in real time. It bypasses the lens, the filter, and the algorithm in a tactile, analog gesture performed through a digital tool.  Her cold, clinical images are intimate and haunting.

In this second series for Purple, following her images in the Purple Japan Issue, Jebb turns her scanner toward the radical press. She rephotographs the covers of cult underground newspapers and rare rebellious magazines.
By transforming these fragile, subversive publications into artistic images, she not only archives a vanishing history of dissidence, but reactivates…