Howard Schatz. 25 years in photography

Howard Schatz is a world-famous photographer who has received international recognition for his portrait work, as well as photographs created in a variety of genres, including dance, sports, and shooting underwater. His works are exhibited around the world and are part of numerous private collections and museums, including the New York International Center for Photography, Auckland Museum and Musee De l’Elysee. In addition, Schatz’s photos have been published in numerous magazines, including Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and on the covers of TIME, Sports Illustrated, US News World Report, and GQ Italia.

Interestingly, this success in photography was preceded by Schatz’s academic career as a retina specialist. He received a medical degree from the University of Illinois and worked for many years as an ophthalmologist in San Francisco before turning his hobby - photography - into a second profession and passion. The first work, according to the author, had a strong influence on his photographic methods, teaching him to carefully look at a person, and, importantly, to find an approach to everyone. He examines in detail the structure and physical structure of the body in the series “Dance”, “Athletes”, “Human Body”, “Folds”, “Motion Study”, transferring many stories from the scientific to the aesthetic dimension.

Among the professional roles of Howard Schatz, the roles of the director and artist are also important, which he tries on himself in the process of filming. In the Projection and Beauty series, Schatz draws patterns of light and color on perfect body surfaces. Creating scripts for the series “In Character: Actors,” he gives the assignment to Abraham F. Murray: “Imagine that you are a teenage girl who decided to go backstage at a Justin Timberlake concert”. At the same time, his models were happy with the idea of habitually “playing something” instead of just posing for a portrait.

As brilliantly as with the actors, Howard Schatz works with the heroes of the Homeless and Prisoners series, using other working methods. It creates subtle conditions for interaction with people who, in other circumstances, would hardly want to face the lens. Schatz invites them to be in the spotlight for several minutes, where they cease to be objects of statistical data and a “blind spot” of society, but become specific people with their own stories. Thanks to the precisely arranged distance, they feel protected, and the viewer does not feel awkward when looking at the portraits. In these series, the social function of photography, so important for the tradition of American photography, is particularly evident.

In the photographs of Howard Schatz, you can find references to various photographic practices and works of famous authors from Robert Mapplethorpe to Greg Gorman and Gien Miley. At the same time, his photographs themselves are becoming unmistakably recognizable in the modern world of numerous images. Thanks to the large formats that the author chooses for his work, the viewer gets the opportunity to correlate himself with the image and see details that are usually inaccessible to our eyes.

For 25 years in photography, Howard Schatz has published more than 20 books, the last two-volume edition of Schatz Images: 25 years combining the best works of the author received the main prize of the International Photobook Award and the title of the book of the year in 2015.