Ryszard Horowitz

Ryszard Horowitz’s love of photography started out as a simple hobby. As a youth, he took pictures of his friends, aspiring jazz musicians hoping their talent would take them out of the poverty of post-WWII Poland.

“My father had a 1937 Leica and I started shooting with that when I was a teenager,” Horowitz reminisces, remembering his childhood in Krakow. “I was using our bathroom as a darkroom and developing pictures in the sink.”

As an adult, he became a skillful and successful special effect photographer, creating advertisements in America for some of the most well-known brands in the world, from car manufacturers like Ford to cosmetic giants such as Revlon.

Two documentaries on his life are currently in the works, one Polish and one American, reflecting the dichotomy of his existence. Despite the fact that the majority of Horowitz’s life was spent in the States, it was his youth in Poland that informed his artistic vision.

When he was just four months old, the Nazis invaded and the Jewish population was rounded up and placed in the notorious ghettoes, Horowitz and his family included. From there, they were moved to a concentration camp on the outskirts of Krakow but were fortunate enough to be given work in Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory, thus taking them out of harm’s way.

Both Thomas Keneally’s award-winning novel, Schindler’s Ark, and Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film, Schindler’s List, contain fragments of Ryszard Horowitz life. “A lot of members of my family were featured in the movie,” he says, “and there are a lot of details about my family in the book.”

In 1944, with the Nazis beginning to consider closing factories not related to the war effort, Schindler moved his operations to Brünnlitz, now part of the modern-day Czech Republic, and began to manufacture armaments. It was here that an SS officer spotted two little children, Horowitz and his cousin, on a day when Schindler was not present on the grounds. The soldier insisted on removing them to Auschwitz, where Horowitz was taken with his father, only for the pair to be separated when Russia’s Red Army began to advance into Poland.

Left alone, he survived solely through the efforts of one of his father’s friends, who was working for the Germans. “When things got dangerous,” Horowitz says, “he would hide me.”

Eventually, Auschwitz was liberated and he was placed in an orphanage along with the small group of children still left alive. Once again he was saved by a friend of his parents, an aunt of Roman Polanski’s, who they had known in Krakow.

“Roman Polanski and I were kids together in the ghetto,” recalls Horowitz, “but he was pushed through the barbed wire and lived outside the camps.”

After the war, the two children and their surviving parents lived together under the same roof. This friendship is one that Horowitz has managed to maintain through the decades. Three years ago, he had a chance meeting with Polanski in Beijing, where the filmmaker had been invited by the Beijing Film Institute and Horowitz was exhibiting some his artwork.

“It was funny, because it was the first time we’d met as established artists,” Horowitz muses. “He lives in a different world than I do and it was nice that they thought of us, in a sense, as two professionals representing different professions.”

Perhaps it was the horrors the two men underwent during the Nazi regime that made them both so driven. For Horowitz, though, the most important part of his childhood is not these memories but the ones that came after, when he returned to Krakow and began studying, first at the city’s High School of Fine Arts and then at the Academy of Fine Arts.

“I believe I received a fantastic education in Poland,” he says. “All my teachers were totally non-political… I spent all my young years very much involved in art history, learning as much as possible, learning how to draw, how to paint. It gave me a fantastic foundation and this, interwoven with my American experience, gave me a very unique way of looking at the world.”

At the age of 20, he finally got a passport and traveled to the US, where he managed to win a scholarship to the prestigious Pratt Institute. From there, Horowitz was jettisoned into a sea of opportunities.

It was on commercial enterprises that he cut his teeth, working on innumerable different projects. Jewels, cars, models – Horowitz brought his brand of special effects photography to them all, in the days before digital technology and at a time when Photoshop was decades away from being developed.

Speaking of one campaign he helmed, the photography magician can still remember the ingenious mechanism he used to manufacture the illusion of a model’s face rising out of an egg.

“The girl was lying further back from the [camera] end than the egg. I was using a very small aperture to keep everything in focus, to extract a great depth of field… At the time, when you were working with film there was no preview so you could not see the effect of your effort until it came back from the lab.”

Unfortunately for Horowitz, on this occasion he realized too late that the lens was broken, rendering the film completely useless. This would have meant thousands of wasted dollars doing the same thing twice – something his clients would have been none too pleased with – if the crew and model had not kindly agreed to redo the entire shoot for free.

“So we did it at night and the following day I handed it to the client,” chuckles Horowitz. “They never knew what happened!”

Ryszard Horowitz is critical of those who have become a slave to modern technology, eschewing original thought for ready-made effects. “Many people think they’re discovering something new,” he says, “but in fact it’s proliferating what’s prepackaged for them. I remember years ago I was invited to Hong Kong to be a judge in a big international design competition. I was appalled at what was sent in – it was literally the same thing I had seen in the States.”

That’s not to say the old hand is a stubborn technophobe who insists on a return to the ‘traditional.’ On the contrary, Horowitz was keen to reap the rewards of digital advances earlier than most, persisting in the face of colleagues who dismissed it as cheap chicanery. Experimenting and learning about cutting-edge machinery and programs, he gradually mastered its use.

“I very rarely use analog now,” he says, “because the whole of the technology has become so high quality that I really don’t see any reason to go back.”

Practical in his approach to photography and life, Horowitz is not ashamed to admit that he went into commercial ventures for the money, especially in light of his poverty-stricken early years. Besides, in his mind, there isn’t necessarily a division between art and advertising.

“I never saw a big problem in considering advertising or work on assignment as potentially having great artistic value,” he states. “As a matter of fact, some of the most recognizable American photographers have their advertising work hanging in museums.”

Now that he’s retired, Ryszard Horowitz doesn’t have to worry about treading the tightrope between the two worlds anymore; his only goal is to intrigue and affect. He has happily settled down creating the photographs that he wants – and doesn’t care if people think they belong on a billboard or in a gallery.

A selection of Ryszard Horowitz’s works will be on display from Oct 20 to Nov 8. Free. Lobby, Wheelock Square, 1717 Nanjing Xi Lu, by Xikang Lu 南京西路1717号, 近西康路(www.wheelocksquare.com)