Sandra Cattaneo Adorno’s third book began with a byproduct of her second. While on press for Águas de Ouro, she noticed the metal plates used to make test proofs, called scarti, the Italian word for scraps. Printed on them, her photographs appeared as monochromes in shocking pink, bright yellow, royal blue, and black. That encounter with her own images, stripped of their original color and function, opened onto a question the book pursues at length: how photography preserves and rearranges fragments of time.
The pandemic supplied the subject. When the world came to a standstill in March 2020, time seemed to stretch into an unknown beyond; unpreserved, it vanished as if it had never occurred. Working from her archive, Cattaneo Adorno began collaging otherwise unrelated images, allowing them to blur the line between reality and illusion as a metaphor for the mind. The photographs move away from representation, dissolving into abstraction. The title carries both of the project’s senses at once: time discrepancy and scraps of time.
Scarti di Tempo is also a collaboration across disciplines. Gueorgui Pinkhassov, the Magnum photographer, contributes an introduction, and Rebecca Norris Webb provides an afterword. A QR code in the book links to an original score composed by the artist’s husband, so that image and sound can be experienced in overlapping harmony. That move from page to score is not decorative; it extends the book’s argument that perception, memory, and connection have their own tempos.
Radius Books publishes the volume in hardcover with an acetate jacket: 148 pages and 62 images at 9.75 by 13 inches. The format matters, because color and sequence carry meaning here. For collectors drawn to the photobook as an argued sequence rather than a portfolio, this is where Cattaneo Adorno’s thinking about time, coincidence, and the archive is most fully worked out, revised in front of the reader from the scrap plate to the finished page.
The result is a book that treats the pandemic not as a subject to be documented but as a change in the conditions of seeing. Its colors, its collisions of unrelated images, and its pairing of page with sound make it an unusually complete statement of an artist’s concerns.
