Date of origin: Unknown
Author/inventor/context: All 3D scanning equipment

In recent years  scans started supplementing photography as a means of forensic documentation of crime scenes in the context of criminal cases or those of war crimes and human rights violations. The scans of crime scenes are meant to be viewed digitally, allowing investigators, juries, judges and lawyers to undertake walk and fly-through studies of the relations between objects in space. When printed (in 3D) the results are three-dimensional snapshots whose relation to sculpture is similar to photography’s relation to painting. They are in short: “documentary sculptures”. White shadows are the name for those areas outside the vision capacity of the machine. The bodies of the people in such scenes are rendered as empty shells, constructed from one side due to the perspective of the machine.