ARTSHOP MAGAZINE
July 2006

Pictures:Bound

Photographer Stephen Schaub’s remarkable, hardcover collection of twenty-five quadtone reproductions published by Indian Hill Gallery was printed by Salto Press in Belgium and bound by van Mierlo in the Netherlands. Here we have seven of the images and a short essay by Indian Hill Gallery Owner/Director Eve O. Schaub

For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know, even as I am known.
First Corinthians 13:12

The original Biblical context of the phrase, "through a glass darkly," uses a shadowy mirror as a metaphor for faulty or imperfect understanding. Yet, the poetic beauty of the phrasing and metaphor also works against this commonly accepted meaning, toward an almost antithetical notion: that of taking joy in imperfection.

In an exciting and lyrical new collection of work, "Through a Glass Darkly" by Stephen M. Schaub employs a hybrid process of his own devising— "Digital Holgaroids," as Schaub refers to them— to reach a place of unique expressive potential which finds joy in the imperfection of photographic description.

After shooting a Polaroid positive with his Holga camera, Schaub scans the Polaroid print. From this "sketch," Schaub then employs select digital processes to achieve the visualized photograph. Final images are rendered in exquisite depth and tonality as piezograph prints on European mould-made papers.

"The photographs choose an emotional over a literal translation of a scene," explains Schaub. "The non-digital information becomes the springboard for the digital, and between the two an interpretation of a scene emerges which may in fact be only distantly related to the original scene."

What emerges is a less rational universe than our own, a collection of non-places and non-things which feels all the more familiar for its anonymity and highly symbolic nature. The overall effect is not unlike what Wordsworth once described as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion…(of) emotion recollected in tranquility."

Eve O. Schaub is the owner and director of Indian Hill Gallery of Fine Photography

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