With Child
WITH CHILD
Howard Schatz
With a Foreword by Vicki Goldberg
"Aesthetically gorgeous, astonishingly frank..."
---American Photo Jan/Feb 2012
In his 18th book, With Child, Howard Schatz has created a ... body of work that is extraordinary. Schatz is a genius with lighting, a master of composition and an artist with form and texture.
---Digital Photo Pro Jan/Feb 2012
...Schatz celebrates the pregnant female nude in these images rippling with romanticism, abstraction, and movement. In one image, he uses light to highlight the upward curve of a thigh, shoulder, and hand. In another, dramatic cropping evokes an abstraction of rounded shapes: hair, breasts, bellies, thighs. A series of photos features dancers, in toe-shoes, achieving a delicate, curvaceous balance. The pregnant body takes prominence, but Schatz also invited his subjects to return with their children a few weeks after birth—and these aren’t your usual cutesy baby photos. The babies are strong, vibrant creatures searching for and clinging to the warmth of human contact. In her foreword Goldberg (Photography in Print) describes Schatz’s portraits as “strong, decidedly unsentimental images,” and these photographs, intimate but never cloying, celebrate the organic and ever-changing human form.
---Publishers Weekly
“A pregnant woman’s body undergoes a remarkable change that, to me, appears to be a kind of sculpture. I felt that this anatomical and physiological change, especially in the last weeks of pregnancy, had the potential for powerful imagery.” ---Howard Schatz from his “Artist’s Note”
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From the Publisher:
In WITH CHILD, award winning photographer and author of seventeen earlier books, Howard Schatz turns his lens in his utterly distinctive way to one of the most basic events of our universe: childbirth. Photographing mothers “with child” before and after the birth, this noted artist brings a new sensibility to a topic that has been discussed, catalogued, and recorded before—but with his unique vision and brilliant analytical tools, explores the subject as it has never before been explored.
Not just a tour de force showing mothers before giving birth, or mothers before birth and later, with their newborn infants, Schatz turns his genius in imagery to asking questions through his photography. With this presentation of 150 original photographs, he leads the reader to many new birth experiences, merely by focusing his camera in ways that no one would have before considered. This book is as much sculpture as photographic image…he demands that the viewer think about the process of the mother while her baby is gestating; and relate the birth of the baby to the mother after it is born. Few photographers have the luxury of devoting this much attention and time to spanning a long-term process such as pregnancy and childbirth. Here, Schatz shows us the continuum in varied and minute detail, so whether we are art lover, photography aficionado, or parent—actual or considering—this is a book that will open eyes.
With an essay by Vicki Goldberg, herself an award winning photographer, essayist, and published author on photography subjects, this book cannot be ignored as it provides the most enlightened treatment of the subject to date. As gift for a parent-to-be, current parent, or even one’s self, this is a book that changes the landscape of how we all view and will experience the gorgeous event of the birth process.
Howard Schatz is a master of the human form. WITH Child is his eighteenth book, the result of almost twenty years of photographing the stunning landscape of a woman’s body in the last two weeks of pregnancy. During the course of those twenty years, his intense focus on the study of structure, contour and physique has also resulted in four remarkable monographs illustrating the body’s power, rhythm, motion, beauty and shape: Athlete, Passion & Line, Nude Body Nude, and Body Knots. Schatz is also known internationally for his unique imagery of dancers underwater. H2O, Schatz’s seventeenth book of photographs, was the third in his series of explorations of imagery made on, over and underwater. This monograph, along with Water Dance and Pool Light, showcases Schatz’s breathtaking underwater photography and his visionary celebration of movement and form.
For In Character: Actors Acting, Schatz’s sixteenth book, he photographed 100 actors of stage, screen and television, directing them in one-on-one improvisation. Schatz’s work with actors can be seen in his on-going monthly feature, entitled In Character in Vanity Fair magazine.
His editorial work has also been published in magazines around the world, including Time, Sports Illustrated, ESPN Magazine, Vogue, Vogue Italia, GQ Italia, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Stern, Life, Black/White,
and American Photo. His work has been featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America, NPR, Fox Sports Network, the Discovery Channel and widely in Europe. He has made extraordinary images for such advertising clients as Ralph Lauren RLX, Escada, Sergio Tacchini, Nike, Reebok, Wolford, Etienne Aigner, Sony, Adidas, Finlandia Vodka, MGM Grand Hotel, Virgin Records, and Mercedes-Benz.
Schatz’s photographs are exhibited in museums and photography galleries internationally and are included in innumerable private collections. He has received international acclaim for his work and was named 2010
Photographer of the Year by the Prix de la Photographie de Paris. His fine art work is represented in New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, and in Switzerland.
Each of Schatz’s books is the result of a unique collaboration with award-winning producer and editor Beverly Ornstein, his wife and business partner. Together they live and work in New York.
Vicky Goldberg is one of the leading voices in the field of photography criticism, and is regularly featured in such national publications as The New York Times. She is the author of numerous books, including the classic Light Matters (Aperture, 2005). In 1997, she received the International Center of Photography's prestigious Infinity Award. She lives in Waterville Valley, NH and New York City.
Published by
Glitterati Incorporated
176 pages • 11 x 14" jacketed hardcover
150 b&w photographs printed in tritone
ISBN13: 978-0-9823799-3-6 • 0-9823799-3-5
$95.00
