EveNSteve — Monumental Historical Works

The collaborative art of EveNSteve begins with place. Their monumental photographic works explore the visual and emotional essence of historic sites through large-scale in-camera panoramic collages—some stretching the full length of a roll of film, others unfolding across multiple panels. Created by photographer Stephen Schaub and author Eve O. Schaub, these contemporary artworks combine photography, handwritten text, and historical research to explore the relationship between landscape, memory, and American history.

Printed on rare and handmade papers from around the world, the photographs are layered with Eve’s handwritten text, fusing past and present, fact and fiction, silence and voice.

Research is central to the process. Historical letters, newspaper clippings, diaries, and speeches surface within the works—interwoven with imagined micro-histories and poetic observations. Like discovering the soundtrack to a silent film, the handwritten words transform the experience of the photographs, immersing the viewer in a deeper form of seeing.

You Will Do Better in Toledo

Toledo, Ohio, has long been a city of movement and convergence: Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa peoples; French traders; German, Irish, Polish, Black, Arab, Dutch, and Latino Americans—all have shaped its landscape. Communities rise and recede like tides, echoing the broader American story of migration, settlement, and reinvention.

But Toledo is also emblematic of post-industrial decline. Vacant lots and boarded windows speak to decades of deindustrialization and economic loss. Still, the city endures.

In this work, Stephen Schaub’s vertical in-camera panoramic photographs reshape Toledo’s skyline into something both monumental and intimate. Eve O. Schaub’s handwritten text traces the hidden histories and hopes of its people, threading through alleyways and rooftops to resurrect stories long buried beneath the asphalt.

Listen to Eve read the text from this monumental artwork:

A Wonderful Plague

Created in the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, A Wonderful Plague bridges multiple pandemics across centuries. On March 17, 2020, Stephen Schaub traveled from Vermont to a rumored smallpox cemetery in Massachusetts while Eve O. Schaub researched the waves of disease that had shaped the region—from early colonial epidemics to the AIDS crisis and the global coronavirus pandemic.

The resulting six-panel photographic installation is set in Provincetown, Massachusetts—a community deeply shaped by both illness and resilience. Layered onto black-and-white landscapes are handwritten fragments: statistics, myths, historical quotations, and reflections on power, loss, and survival.

The title comes from a 1620 colonial document describing the belief that God had “cleared the land” of Indigenous people through plague. The work confronts the intertwined legacies of disease, colonialism, and faith while asking difficult questions about how societies interpret catastrophe and who controls the narrative of history.The Home of My Choice

The Home of My Choice

Alexander Twilight—educator, minister, and legislator—remains one of the most complex figures in Vermont history. Often described as the first African American college graduate in the United States, Twilight’s identity and legacy have been interpreted and reinterpreted across generations.

In this series, EveNSteve examine not only Twilight’s achievements but the deeper implications of how history remembers individuals. What does it mean to celebrate a man who neither openly embraced nor rejected the racial identity later assigned to him? What does that reveal about the narratives Americans construct about race and progress?

The photographs invite the viewer into quiet architectural and natural spaces connected to Twilight’s life. Over these images, Eve’s handwritten words pose urgent questions about race, memory, and historical interpretation.

Declared Alexander Twilight Day in Vermont, September 23 honors a man whose story resists simplification—and whose life mirrors the complicated truths of American history itself.