My Love On Red • 44" x 68" Pigment on Hand Made Amate Paper with Mark Making

Stephen Schaub: A Hybrid Vision of Place, Memory, and Imperfection

My work exists at the intersection of photography, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. This singular hybrid medium, developed over more than three decades of rigorous experimentation, combines analog film capture with advanced digital techniques and rare handmade materials from around the world. The result is a body of work that invites viewers into the poetic terrain of memory, perception, and dream.

At the core of my practice is a fascination with the psychological and symbolic resonance of place. Rather than objective records, my landscapes are emotional reconstructions: layered compositions built from overlapping in-camera exposures, unconventional optics, and tactile surfaces. Whether working with historic and handmade papers such as Amate and Japanese Gampi or encaustic wax techniques, each piece becomes a singular artifact — an image that exists nowhere so much as it does within the viewer's own internal landscape.

Drawing on historical precedent from Pictorialist photography and Japanese aesthetic philosophies such as wabi-sabi, I embrace the aesthetics of imperfection, transition, and incompleteness. My work revels in the enigmatic, the flare, and the ambiguity — what I call the "joy of imperfection" — as an expressive language unto itself. Like a haiku or a cinematic fragment, these images often bypass narrative logic to reach instead for the emotional remnants of experience: a blurred figure, a radiant sliver of light, a structure dissolving into shadow.

My process resists replication. Each work is created as a unique one-of-one, often in frames specific to the piece. My cameras are frequently custom-modified or adapted from vintage equipment — pinholes, zone plates, and plastic toy cameras. These are deliberate instruments of distortion, allowing me to render the seen world through a lens of feeling.

What unifies my work across media, scale, and subject is a sustained inquiry into how we see — not just with the eye, but with the mind and the memory. These artworks resist easy classification: a conjuring of moments half-remembered, truths half-seen — evocative, lyrical, and deeply human.

They hover between the photographic and the painterly, the actual and the dreamed. As one reviewer noted, these are "images of art dreaming about itself."

Since 2019, this practice has found its fullest expression in collaboration with Eve O. Schaub under the name EveNSteve.