Lawrence Fine Art is pleased to offer select works from Howard Schatz's acclaimed Botanica Series. This selling exhibition is available to browse on Artsy here.

Photography is different than seeing and seeing is different than vision. Vision is what gets us to stop, pause and look again. What we look for in all our artists is true vision. Howard Schatz has possessed vision for some 35 years.

Schatz gave up a career as a retinal surgeon and a clinical professor to follow his passion for photography. He first established a following in the 1990s with two collections of underwater photography, Water Dance and Pool Light. He has since gone on to photograph dancers, athletes, actors, the homeless, flowers, circus performers and design and execute his own compositions. His work often straddles the blurry line between fashion and art and makes the argument for fashion photography as art.

Schatz's often focuses on the human body--the graceful form of the dancer, the musculature of the athlete-but he also finds beauty in images we might find grotesque or disturbing. That is the hallmark of a great artist--to have us take a new look.

His "botanicals" do the same thing.  They are intensely sensual and abstract. They take us past the cliched prettiness of flowers to see how the beauty of the parts creates the beauty of the whole.

Schatz was awarded the 2015 IPA International Photography Award for Book of the Year for his retrospective, "Schatz Images: 25 Years." The IPA Awards, administered by the Lucie Foundation, are considered among the most prestigious in the field of photography.

His work recently showed at the Brooklyn Museum as part of its "Who Shot Sports" exhibition. His work has been shown in numerous museums, including the Whitney, the Guggenheim, San Francisco MOMA, the Met, MOMA, and that Art Institute of Chicago, and can be found in numerous private collections. Schatz has published 26 books of his work.