Scanner Art

Everything becomes something else; it has new meaning for me," says Robert Creamer. The sunroom in Robert Creamer's home is filled with dead and dying things: browning lotus leaves, heron bones, a halved nautilus shell exposing spiraling empty chambers, plates of desiccated irises, and other flora and fauna. Like most good photographers, Creamer, 58, is patient, waiting for that moment when his subjects "reveal something new," he says. Only then will he capture them in outsize photographs that he takes not with a camera but with a digital tool—a flatbed scanner. Here are some of them: Wow! These are beautiful!