Howard Stein

In 1968 while serving in the USN Submarine service I was given the job of ships photographer. I really had no experience and no formal training to do this but at the time it seemed like a good thing to do. They gave me a full Topcon Super D 35mm camera and the manual and told me what I could and could not shoot. When I got out of the service, my father game me his camera, which just happened to be a Topcon Super D 35mm camera. I started to shoot stuff around the house and around school. One of those first images, a snow scene, still hangs in my house as an example of the kind of photography I enjoy. My basic philosophy was the same then as it is now – Take photos of things people look at everyday, but don’t really see. This is the underlying theme of my photography. I like people to see what I see. I us 35mm Nikon equipment both film and digital. I scan older black and white and color negatives as well as slides. In 1997, I sold the last of three old Toyota Land cruisers, (the Jeep style). You might ask what the hell this has to do with sculpture and it would be a good question. On the surface it has nothing to do with sculpture except when I sold the last one I had a couple of items in my garage, which took up a lot of room. One was a set of gas cutting torches and a mig welder. I also had what could only be described as a lot of junk parts. One afternoon I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with all the parts and I started to put some spark plugs onto a camshaft from one of the engines I had. I topped it off with an old motorcycle mirror and mounted it on a scrap of plywood. “Plugged” was my first piece. The next piece was “Ed’s Golf Hookah”, a gag gift for a friend’s 50th. I then realized how wonderful the materials were and as you will see the rest is history. I have two distinct styles of sculpture, my abstracts and my other pieces. Please do what I do when I create the, laugh and enjoy them. The original idea for “imagesandsteel.com” came from my first one-man exhibition. The images were all old rusted metal objects, most of which could also, (and in some cases were), used in my sculptures. My sculptures utilize only found objects and scrap metals. It’s the stuff most people throw away.