Introducing Vathography

A camera captures everything we see: the light, the colors, the shadows; that has always shaped the way we photograph. The release of Marigold V2, which now breaks a photograph down into separate components with the fine detail needed for high-resolution artworks, inspired me to explore what a photograph becomes when distilled to a single element. With Vathography, that element is volume. From the photograph’s data, a diffusion transformer infers the depth: the relative distance of every point in the scene, estimated from a single image. The result is no longer a photograph in the documentary sense, but a translation of it into volume, the forms that live beneath the light.

Vathography, from Greek vathos (depth) + -graphy (drawing, writing): drawing depth.

In photography, focus is fixed by the lens at the moment of capture: one plane is sharp, and the choice is final. Working from volume, that constraint disappears. Depth is a value, and focus becomes the mapping of that value to tone and color: a thin white band picks out a single distance, a gradient spreads attention across many, and any distances can be brought forward at once. Focus stops being a property of the lens and becomes a property of the image, authored freely using contrast or color.

Artworks have been made from measured geometry before. ScanLAB Projects has spent more than a decade working with laser scanners, retracing Muybridge’s Yosemite in Post-Lenticular Landscapes, and point-cloud art, built from laser scans or from many photographs taken around a subject, has become an academic subject of its own.

The Vathography approach is different. At capture, it needs only a single photograph: we photograph freely with our camera, no additional equipment required, and the volume is inferred from the image itself.

The inferred depth map, originally meant to be an intermediate post-process pass, is elevated to the final artwork: the photograph distilled to its volume.

The practice redefines the photograph’s focus. It is no longer determined by the lens at capture. It becomes a creative choice, placed anywhere, at any distance, on one subject or across several at once.

This changes the process itself and gives us a new approach to photography: we compose with depth and volume, purposefully for Vathography.

Achieving all of this with the fine detail needed for high-resolution artworks has only recently become practical, with the release of Marigold V2. This inspired me to create Vathography and publish it on 1 October 2026. Thanks to the Marigold V2 team’s generous Apache 2.0 license, the approach is open to everyone, and I look forward to seeing what other artists create with it.

ComfyUI. For the depth estimation, I started working with Marigold V2 at release, building my own pipeline with an LLM before ComfyUI supported it. It now runs natively in ComfyUI from a ready-made template, with a guide.

Caution for new ComfyUI users: ComfyUI is free and open source, and anyone can publish custom nodes for it. Some have carried malicious code. The guide provided is the official native implementation.

Blender. For the creative focus, I remap the depth values in Blender, the Free and Open Source 3D Creation Software.

Askiagraphy: a photograph estimated free of lighting and shadow, revealing its essential colors, its quiet structure.

Karim Joseph Nassar, multidisciplinary digital artist based in the canton of Bern, Switzerland.