It was only six years ago that I began teaching myself to paint and I was determined to learn how to paint people but not having the money to pay for models, I had to cast around for a great book of photography on the human body. You may be surprised that there are so few but one photographer seemed able to produce great works – strong on both lighting and detail – and that was Howard Schatz. I can honestly say that his photographs are so good that I would not have the ability I appear to have now if I had never seen his photographs (link to my website).

There are few books of photography by a single photographer more beautiful than this collection, H2o: The Underwater Photography of Howard Schatz. Most publishers when producing collections of photography, appear to forget that a book of images is a portable gallery and therefore needs the same sensitivity in the choice of image and how each image is presented as would be seen were the reader to be a viewer and be stood in front of the original.

As suggested by the title, H2o: The Underwater Photography of Howard Schatz, the photographs reproduced in Schatz’s latest collection are focused on water. As this is a collection of Howard Schatz’s photographs, it’s also worth stating that the collection has a lot of nudity but if you’re looking for cheap thrills, you won’t find them. Many of the models photographed here are dancers by profession and Schatz has used the apparent weightlessness provided by suspension in water to record some of the more amazing movement that other photographers would have to capture through many takes and high-speed cameras.

It is perhaps because Howard Schatz works primarily in advertising that his range is so extensive and so imaginative. Used to working in a highly competitive field where your ‘brand’ is only as strong as the images you produce (for the teams of people who create billboards, TV adverts etc are rarely named), Schatz has become used to creating impact though imaginative use of cropping, colour, lens effects and so on. He does not appear afraid to distance himself from that school of photography that holds to the idea of great photographs being about ‘mood’ and only presented in monochrome. Neither do his photographs focus on woe, despair and other ‘artistic reflections’. A lot of Schatz’s photographs are about joy and may appear trivial at first but looking at the faces of the models, it was easy to see that they were having fun, laughing in pictures where they had obviously been posed to be sensual, moody, ‘artistic’.

Fun should be infectious and boo-sucks to the folks that frown on unclothed skin. This book would make a fantastic gift to any aspiring photographer, dancer or swimmer – or simply anyone interested in the creative uses of light and colour. Though the collection of photographs in this collection is not as extensive as Schatz’s previous, ‘Nude Body Nude’, the variety of images compensates for the loss of bulk (as does the much lower price). Link