Through A Glass Darkly | Stephen M. Schaub
For now we see through a glass darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.
First Corinthians 13:12
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
The original Biblical context of the phrase, “through a glass darkly,” uses a shadowy mirror as a metaphor for a 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 prints are rendered in exquisite depth and tonality as carbon black pigment piezograph prints on European mould-made papers (BERGGER PN32).
“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.”
