the werner collection        Silver Spring, MD

Stephan L. Werner, m.d.

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January February   2008

    Stephan L. Werner, MD, urologist, peripatetic traveler and raconteur's photographic works had previously been known only to a few friends and those (un?)-fortunates who have been receiving his annual holiday CD. His first one man show, World View I, was mounted at Doctor's Community Hospital, in Lanham MD, in June 2004 .  Since then he has had several shows at Doctors Community Hospital, The East Gallery of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, and pieces in several juried shows.

Predominantly self-taught, his artistic training consisted of converting olive jars into vases with his artist mother's oil paints, and watching Drawing with Jon Nagy on television in the 1950's. He was introduced to dark room technique by his father, working in their Brooklyn tenement kitchen behind black out curtains left over from World War II.

At Clark University in Worcester,  (A.B. 1960), a  professor required the production of a pen and ink neuroanatomy atlas and a watercolor histology workbook, projects that bore the early fruits of his artistic bent. He has dabbled in copper sculpture, mostly fountains, and stained glass, creating calderesque mobiles.

    Introduced to computers in the 1960's in medical school,  he was a principal in IATROsystems Medical  Office Systems during the decade of the  80's.  He became interested in web design in 2000 and has created several websites : this one, his office website (wfurology.com) and others.

    Dr. Werner caught the travel bug as a merchant seaman in the late 1950's and has traveled widely with his wife Ann and family, always with several cameras at hand. Fascinated by color, he was frustrated in his inability to control his art until the advent of digital photographic processing and manipulation.   The coming of the digital  photo enlarger at the local photography shops created a whole new world, and he frequently had to be chased from Snap Shops at closing.  He says, "Digital printing has been a great boon to me as I have never had a visual medium before that I felt I had some control over.  I am not above computer enhancing my pictures to remove an errant foot or telephone wire, and am now experimenting with being even more creative on the computer.  Maybe someday I'll learn how to paint".  He works at home with his own equipment..