Pool Light - Owen Edwards

Everyone's Favorite Photo Book - Artful Nudes, December 23, 1999
By A Customer

I have over 50 photo books in my collection, but this one gets the most attention. Everyone seems to linger over the many beautiful images in this book, even after quickly flipping through other photo books by great masters. Howard Schatz has taken some beautiful vibrantly colored (and some black and white) artistic photos underwater, even though most other photographers get ugly photos with a horrible blue cast when they take underwater shots. The monumental effort necessary to create these great images is documented in this book and is well worth the read too.
By the way, it is interesting to note that some people I know who are offended even by what many would consider artistic nudes are surprisingly not offended by the nudes in this book. So, if you tend to be offended by artistic nudes, perhaps you may find this book opens your eyes to the beauty of the nude as an art form. I suspect with this book that Howard Schatz may have made a significant contribution to the acceptance of nudes by the general public.

The Human form has no better friend, December 28, 1998
By pemerson@knight-hub.com (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

As a photographer, choreographer and dancer myself, I tend to be a tough sell on books which hype a photographer's mastery of the human form, particularly where dance or dancers are concerned. But such is my appreciation, and awe, of what Schatz has accomplished in his water studies that I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw that he had published "Pool Light."
Less a book about dancers than about the incredible beauty of the human body, "Pool Light," transcends the very things which frustrate us as movers. In this book, the photographer and his models make us believe in both flight and fantasy. They inspire us to see shape unihibited by gravity or earthly confines. And they succeed in taking nudity, within a photographic environment, out of the controversial realms of "indecency" and restoring it to art in the way the great painters have seen it.

Technically, the work is nothing short of a marvel. Great photography, like any great art, deceives the viewer into believing that what they see is so easy, so natural, as to be routinely simple. In "Pool Light," we see none of the sweat, none of the frustration and aches (and presumably water-logged participants), which must certainly have gone into each image. Instead, we are invited simply to see that most classic of forms, and ancient of muses, the human figure, shown, through the most contemporary of techniques, in a way which celebrates both even as it transcends our sense of their limitations.

http://www.amazon.com/Pool-Light-Owen-Edwards/dp/188800147X

http://www.howardschatz.com/