An absorbing story of conquering fate, longing for freedom and realizing the American dream. Post-war Krakow, Poland, and the artistic underground. The New York of Mad Men, the city of jazz, great dreams and unlimited possibilities. Imagine, all this having been preceded by a small child’s survival of the Krakow ghetto and the hells of Auschwitz.

In his biography, Ryszard Horowitz, a world renown photographer and one of the pioneers of special effect photography and digital imaging, describes his meaning of chance and destiny, a difficult path to success, and the power of great love. He reveals the ruthlessness of advertising and fine arts worlds, discusses his life-time friendship with Roman Polanski, his friendships with Dave Brubeck, Richard Avedon and many other creative giants that have shaped his life. He not only paints a colorful portrait of an era, but reveals the secrets of his photographic vision and his life philosophy.

Ryszard Horowitz’s life reads like a Hitchcock film. It starts with an earthquake, and the tension continues to grow making his book impossible to put down.

Ryszard Horowitz, is a friend of mine, a New Yorker. He is a dazzling and internationally recognized artist, a pioneer of special effects photography as a medium for the most exhilarating and beautiful works. I met him before I saw his work, and it’s a great thing to find that someone you’ve been lucky enough to meet produces work as rich and challenging and liberating as his. Some of his quite astonishing work, displayed regularly in the world at large, can be seen at https://ryszardhorowitz.com

His portfolio includes analog and digital works and some quite renowned jazz photographs, among others. My suggestion, without prejudice against any of the other materials in his portfolio, is to begin with these digital works. There is something about, for example, a white dove rolling up a cone of sky and lake in its beak that is not only joyful and rich in imagination but also stands as tribute to the fact that Horowitz was the one of the founding geniuses of this sort of work, years before computers and digital technology had become available.

He is also a child survivor of the Holocaust, of the Jewish ghetto and of Oskar Schindler's camp at Brinnlitz. Indeed his family had a lifetime association with Oskar. Ryszard was enormously kind to me when I was writing Schindler's List, though it was obvious that the threat that had hung over his childhood had influenced his adult life. He was one of the youngest children found in Auschwitz at war's end, and is one of the children shown on iconic footage of the liberation of the death camp. Though the Holocaust overshadowed his early life, his life as an artist has been of world significance and interest entirely on its own. It is also true that he is one of the few artists who survived the Holocaust not to draw (at least consciously) from that experience in his own art. After reunion with his parents, he grew up in post-war Communist Krakow, and was a precocious art student who took renowned pictures of the jazz greats when they visited Poland. He emigrated to the United States and became acquainted with the world of American photography and jazz and art from the 1960s onwards.

Ryszard has now written his biography, which has been a success in his native Poland, but I think his story deserves world-wide attention. Ryszard is a most amiable and humble man, and yet still one of the most talented among his peers. And, as always, his brilliant work and adult life, his marriage to a wonderful woman, Ania, an architect, is all its own story while at the same time being a reproach to a regime that tried to end his life too early and too brutally. Polish is his first language of course, so the autobiography he published in Poland would need translation. But I am confident that after looking at his work on line, his images will further affirm the extraordinary life he has had, so powerfully described in the excerpts of his book that I've read in translation. I always thought of him as a modern star, and always thought of his journey as exceptional.

Tom Keneally