Originally published in PDN

Copyright for all photos belongs to Howard Schatz

Photo captions
#1) Ballerina Katita Waldo, the red-headed muse of two books by Howard
Schatz

#2 Katita in Underwater Study #1, 1993

#3 Underwater study #132, 1993

Underwater study # 180, 1993

To create the otherworldly images in Waterdance, photographer Howard Schatz invited members of the San Francisco Ballet to disrobe, inhale, plunge nude into the deep end of an indoor pool and float in dreamlike suspension while he sat on the bottom snapping pictures. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of his project is that the ballerinas obliged, thanks less to the considerable eloquence of Schatz than to the good graces of his muse, the fiery-haired dancer Katita Waldo.

A leading member of the San Francisco Ballet, Katita had established an excellent rapport with Schatz while modeling for his previous photo book, Seeing Red (Pomegranate Press, 1993). Trusting his seriousness and sharing his passion for making great photos, Katita was the first dancer to take the plunge for Waterdance. Many of her colleagues followed suit, but the most striking images in the series feature Katita’s alabaster body and flaming hair.

For Schatz, Waterdance is not just a new body of work, but a new way of working with the body. In the 48 underwater photographs that went on display in San Francisco’s Vision Gallery on December 8th, 1995, he sets some of the world's most beautiful bodies free from clothes, conventions and gravity. He also frees underwater photography from its usual washed-out colors and murky light. His success on both counts has convinced a premier photographic publisher (Graphis) to issue Waterdance as its first book-length monograph. The handsome volume with its sensuous imagery will be released in time for the fall book season and is likely to grace many a coffee-table come Christmas morning.

Schatz is entirely self-trained in photography, having entered the profession in mid-life after a successful career in another field (rumored to be surgery). A ceiling-high library of photo books has been his school of visual art, and he has marked each stage of his rapid progression by publishing a book of his own. The first two books, Gifted Woman and Homeless, were monochrome works on public issues. But in the last two, Seeing Red and Waterdance, he explores a more passionate and subjective realm.

The idea for Waterdance came to Schatz, appropriately enough, in the pool. ‘I was swimming when I realized that underwater the body is weightless, suspended, free,’ he said. ‘It occurred to me that would be wonderful thing for a dancer-- to be freed, even briefly, from gravity.’

But gravity is not a forgiving law. The weightless images in Waterdance, like the soaring leaps in ballet, are the product of a prolonged and sometimes painful process that demanded physical stamina and technical ingenuity. The first challenge was color. ’People think you paint the bottom of a swimming pool blue,’ said Schatz. ‘But the bottom of a pool is white. It looks blue because the water sucks out the red and yellow wavelengths.’

Having devoted a whole book to the ‘rapture of red,’ Schatz was not about to let a mere physical law deprive him of his favorite color. He began experimenting with filters and soon found that gelling his lights with tomato red restored the missing part of the spectrum. ‘What you see in the photos is true color,’ he says. ‘But it looks extraordinary because you’re not used to seeing true color underwater.’

Lighting was even more difficult. His purpose in working underwater was to capture a dreamy and sensuous mood, but Schatz found that conventional lighting dispelled the illusion. ‘Direct sunlight is a small hard light with multiple rippling reflections,’ he said. ‘Strobe is also a tight, hard light. I wanted something soft, beautiful, magical.’

Schatz hung a giant silk above the water and started working with larger strobes outside the pool. That gave him the soft, shadow-less light he sought, but it created two new problems. The most pressing was that Schatz and his dancer friends would be electrocuted if one of the high-powered strobes fell in the water. Less catastrophically, the humid atmosphere of the pool could ruin an expensive strobe in a hurry. Schatz solved both problems by locating the strobes behind a glass partition some 30 feet from poolside. A sync chord and radio transmitter let him to fire the lights by pressing the shutter button on his camera as he sat on the bottom of the pool.

At last, everything fell into place. ‘The lighting washed through the diffusion screen and softly bathed the dancers," he said. ‘There was no harshness, nothing grotesque. The dancers were beautiful. The water was crystal clear. The lighting was magical. It all created this beautiful feeling of weightlessness.’

Free to collaborate with the dancers on making beautiful photographs, Schatz would go down to the deep end of the pool with his model and describe the pose he wanted. Then they would both hyperventilate and go under water. Wearing a weight belt, Schatz would sink to the bottom while the model arched and flexed above him. The strobes allowed him to fire off a shot every three or four seconds, and the dancers used the recycling interval to adjust their poses. Generally, they would stay underwater for a series of four or five shots. After a couple of hours in the pool, the dancers would have red eyes, running noses and a distinct desire to quit. Schatz himself would stay in the water and invite another model to join him. Sometimes he shot four or five people in a single day.

‘The longest stretch was ten hours in the pool,’ he said. ‘During the heavy part of the project, my hair turned lighter from the chlorine. My skin got dry and itched all the time. I had an ear infection until a doctor told me about a product called Swimmer’s Ear. Then I got Swimmer’s Conjunctivitis until I learned to wash my eyelids with soap. But I also got this solo performance from some of the world’s most beautiful dancers. They were only a few feet away and performing for no one in the whole wide world but me. It was pretty wonderful.’

Although Waterdance began with reflections on weightlessness, Schatz was really trying to capture the emotional nuances of that physical state. ‘Weightlessness was the structure,’ he said, ‘and within the weightless environment, there was the expression of great joy, the exuberant feeling of running and running in the outfield and falling on the grass with the ball in your glove. It was about love, but not cuddly, warm, womb-like love. Something more sensuous and passionate.’