Howard Schatz’s H20 collection is a breathtaking feat of underwater photography and a visionary celebration of movement and form. Working with uncommonly graceful and aquatically gifted dancers, models, and performers, photographer Schatz finds joyous inspiration underwater. The images in H2O take advantage of water's unique properties - light, clarity, buoyancy, and reflectivity - to create a delightfully serene and otherworldly aesthetic. At once uncanny, lithe, athletic, and mysterious, the figures in Schatz's photographs transform the pool into studio and stage.
Howard Schatz first established a following in the 1990s with two collections of underwater photography, Water Dance and Pool Light. In H2O, water figures into an artistic equation that allows it to become the partner to Schatz's subjects. Ripples bend light, scrims of bubbles surround swimmers, and undulating reflections are cast down from the mirrored "ceiling" of the pool surface, enabling Schatz to create two pictures in one-a realistic image and its more figurative, fantastical opposite. The result is an impressionistic interplay of self and mirror, light and shadow, suspension and motion. The photographs in H2O, Water Dance and Pool Light are the result of Schatz's personal artistic endeavor, pursued over the course of 15 years of exploration in, on and around the water.
Schatz's books are known worldwide: In Character: Actors Acting Schatz's sixteenth book of photographs, was published in April 2006 by Bulfinch Press. Schatz photographed 100 actors of stage, screen and television, directing them in one-on-one improvisation. Botanica (Bulfinch 2005) and Athlete, (HarperCollins, 2002) were Schatz's two other most recently published books of photographs. Other titles include: Nude Body Nude; Body Knots, Passion And Line, and Pool Light. Schatz's editorial work has been published in magazines around the world, including Time, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Vogue Italia, GQ Italia, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Stern, Life, Black/White, American Photo, Photo France, and Photo Italia. His work has been featured on the Today Show, Good Morning America, NPR, Fox Sports Network, the Discovery Channel and widely in Europe.
