TRENDS in PHOTOGRAPHY: Ryszard HOROWITZ (Poland)

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selfportrait R. Horowitz

"Nothing belongs to anywhere anymore. All the cats have been let out of all the bags, and they've got mixed up."
William T.Vollmann, 1993

"Astonish me!" Alexey Brodovitch challenged his students. Actually, the former creative director of Harper's Bazaar was quoting the earlier "étonnez-moi!" of the Russian ballet master Sergei Diaghilev, but with his charge Brodovitch set the stage for more than half a century of modernist design in America.
Design -whether it was illustrational, typographic, or photographic- was obliged to be provocative and new; otherwise it would disappear within the quotidian white-noise of that which assaults us visually. "I hate imitation and clichés," he said to a class in 1964; "I hope we can discover a new way of communication... You should provoke me and only then can I provoke you back. I believe in this backfire technique." The model of contemporary design and photography Brodovitch promoted in his classes and promulgated in the pages of Harper's Bazaar between 1934 and 1958 was a fertile, energetic, and sophisticated laboratory - a sort of one-person Bauhaus - in which such notable photographers as Richard Avedon, Hiro, Art Kane, Arnold Newman, Irving Penn -and Ryszard Horowitz- refined their personal visions and styles.

Ultimately, it does not matter that many of Horowitz's photographs were created for advertising or editorial purposes. What matters is their completeness, their singularity, and their unparalleled innovation. Ryszard Horowitz's photo-compositions are ultimately a set of early excursions into the imaginative as opposed to menu-driven options artists now have in fabricating the potential worlds that lay before us, worlds of con-sensual hallucinations and poetry and astonishment. As an artist of these new cyberspaces he shows us what inventions are possible, what complete visual freedoms are now available for fashioning images of considerable provocation, and what unparalleled scenic wonders are latent in the latest electronic and computer technologies at hand - and all this in the service of Brodovitch's mandate: "Astonish me!"
Robert A. Sobieszek

"The most important heritage I got from my country is an understanding of art, painting in particular. A photographer ought to be able to use in his work the whole achievement of art history, and his work should be a sum of artistic experience from the past". And for the new technology and how he has harnessed it, Horowitz says: "I exchanged the darkroom for the computer. I don't intend spending the rest of my life trapped in electronics. It is a certain stage for me, one of the techniques which I am applying at the moment, because it suits my present creative purposes best."

And the future? "Where I am now is closest to where I began as a painter," Ryszard says, "where I have a blank canvas and I can do anything. I never had either the technique or the patience as a naturalistic painter to achieve what I can now achieve by combining photography with digital techniques. The complexity gives me the means to achieve my ideas, so I am finally able to use the medium to project my inner dreams and fantasies, all using the most communicative medium that there is. The paradox is that I am drawn increasingly back to simple imagery again. When Jo Peter Witkin gave me his print I felt a jealousy. This was something he had photographed and produced in his own darkroom. I miss the control that comes from that solitary creative process."

Pearlbirth

The aesthetic genius of Ryszard Horowitz's photography is squarely rooted in a strategy of unqualified provocation. Regardless of its intent, whether the work was done for advertising, editorial, experimental, or strictly personal reasons, his motivation for the past two decades has been dominated not only by a need to make images that are compellingly and startlingly original, but also to defy the very logic by which photographic narratives are read and iconic emblems comprehended. His visual fantasies are not taken from a crude realist world; they are formed purely by an overactive and joyful imagination that plays with equal amounts of the unexpected, the uncanny, and the oneiric. His means range from the hard physics of conventional camera optics to the sophisticated morphings of the latest electronic software. Part magician and wry humorist, part consummate craftsperson of cut-and-paste montages, part techno-jock and hacker of virtual irrealities,

“This type of computer imaging has much in common not only with set design, but also with special-effects films. The goal of special effects is the mastery of nature through tricking the eye. In order to aid in the suspension of disbelief, the viewer is in collusion with the effects artist in the sense that both parties really want the illusion to work. The principal requirement needed to allow this process to succeed is photorealism. Trompe l’oeil pictures work because of the intellectual co-perception of two divergent forms of surface information: illusory space and the medium’s own actual two-dimensionality (the pixels, monitor, paint, canvas, grain or noise)”.
Robert Bowen in ‘Digital Image Creation’

www.ryszard-horowitz.com

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