Passion & Line: Photographs of Dancers

by Howard Schatz, Beverly J. Ornstein, Richard Philp (Introduction)

It isn't enough to say that Howard Schatz admires dancers. He adores them. Schatz' pictures are not about dance; they are photographs of dancers as phenomenal graceful and powerful; explosive or ecstatic in motion, elegant and elemental while at rest. There is more to dance than bodies, but without bodies there is no dance. And however much natural beauty a dancer may have, years of training and a daily regimen that might break an Olympic rower, produce human forms that are nothing less than masterpieces of kinetic sculpture.
In Passion & Lies, Schatz interprets these hard-won creations through his art, combining exploration and adoration in equal measure.

Genres: Reference, Art, Photography

218 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1997

Reviews

[Rod · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is almost too much. Dancing is by its very nature a sensual act... doing it in the nude pushes it into the stratosphere. As a devoted fan of both sensual dance and of DRAWING sensual dance and dancers, this book was a God-send of "swipe material", as an artist friend of mine once put it. If I have any reservations at all, it's simply the photographer's somewhat odd choice of having full-frontal pictures of the women dancers naked, but having the male dancers either shot from the back or wearing g-strings. What, would the sight of a male dancer's genitals have gotten the book banned, but a female's are fine?

[Loree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Howard Schatz is one of my favorite artistic nude photographers. Exquisite book