PHOTO COMPOSERS
Born in Krakow, Poland, Horowitz survived internment in Auschwitz during World War II to grow up and study painting, theater and filmmaking, first in Poland and, later, at New York's Pratt Institute. For over 25 years he has won myriad awards for both his fine arts and advertising "photo compositions."
During the last several years, Horowitz has been working closely with Robert Bowen, a gifted computer visual effects artist, former director of the digital print division at R/Greenburg Associates, and now partner in Horowitz+Bowen Studio. Winner of numerous awards for his widely exhibited computer graphics, photography and digitally manipulated images, his work has been featured in scores of publications as diverse as Newsweek and Advertising Age, American Cinematographer and Computer Pictures. In addition to Ryszard Horowitz, Bowen's clientele regularly includes many art directors and other luminaries of the photography world. Robert Bowen also lectures internationally, and he is on the graduate faculties of Photography and Computer Graphics at New York's School of Visual Arts.
Together, Bowen and Horowitz use Silicon Graphics' Indy, running Alias Animator(TM), Barco Creator(TM) and Adobe's Photoshop(TM), to create startling and inventive images for their international roster of clients. While there's a considerable creative overlap, Bowen tends to spend much of his time at the Indy workstation, while Horowitz concentrates on the photography. Assembling the elements into one photo-realistic image is a true partnership.
Bowen says that the software is so sophisticated these days that writing in-house proprietary code to enhance the programs is becoming a thing of the past. "What we're noticing," he says, "is that it's harder and harder to stay ahead of what's already available in off-the-shelf products for Silicon Graphics systems. And the graphical user interfaces are so much better and easy to work with in the off-the-shelf software, such as SoftImage(TM)."
