Photographer Howard Schatz has won international acclaim for his books, including Athlete and H2O. his magazine work in such publications as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and his exhibitions around the world. Now Schatz has published a tribute to the beauty of pregnant women, capturing more than 100 mothers-to-be over a twenty-year period. WITH child, which includes an introduction by Vicki Goldberg, will be published by Glitterati on December 1, 2011. Schatz has an unique background that compliments his work, this project in particular. Before he became a full-time photographer, Schatz was a physician. During his residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Schatz delivered scores of babies and that experience inspired this remarkable twenty-year-long project. In 1995 the success of his work as a photographer and his passion for making images led him to leave his practice and focus on photography full-time. In WITH child, his eighteenth book of photographs, Schatz comes full circle, returning to that early fascination, with his photographic studies of the sculptural glory of a woman’s body during last two weeks of pregnancy. In two cases, the model’s water broke as she posed for Schatz, effectively ending the session.
As Vicki Goldberg writes in her introduction: “In Schatz’s studio, all subjects are transformed…These images go beyond a particular stage of the body's life into an exploration: what can the pregnant body be while it remains itself? A number of the images verge on the symbolic, virtual symbols of fertility: the mother goddess as a powerful emblem. Schatz’s command of light and attention to its dramatic possibilities make of many images, beyond what they signify, a photographic tour de force. These strong, decidedly unsentimental images, a vigorous rather than a romantic view of pregnancy, are given a pronounced flavor of charm, intimacy, and gentle humor by the added photographs of what the whole enterprise
is about: the baby or the mother with her baby.”
About the author: Howard Schatz is among the most in-demand photographers working today. His critically acclaimed books include H20, Athlete, In Character: Actors Acting, Nude Body Nude, Passion and Line, Body Knots, Botanica, and Rare Creatures. WITH child is his eighteenth book of photographs done in collaboration with his wife and business partner, Beverly Ornstein. Schatz’s fine art has been exhibited in museums and photography galleries internationally and has been published in countless magazines including Time, Vogue, Sports Illustrated, Life, the New York
Times, GQ, Italian Vogue, The New Yorker, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Forbes, American Photo and Entertainment Weekly. He is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair.
Vicki Goldberg has written about photography for the Village Voice and Art Quarterly and is coauthor, with Robert Silberman, of American Photography: A Century of Images. Goldberg is also the author of the biography Margaret Bourke-White. With Child by Howard Schatz with an introduction by Vicki Goldberg |
