Arnold Schwartzman, the Designer Who Chased Deco

An Oscar-winning eye that has spent five decades photographing the world’s finest facades

Arnold Schwartzman has spent more time looking at Art Deco buildings than almost anyone alive, and he has done it with a camera in one hand and an Oscar on his shelf. Born in East London in 1936, he grew up in Margate, where his family ran a hotel and where his first job in the industry, fittingly, was as an assistant projectionist at the local cinema. He studied at Canterbury College of Art before a career that took him through British television, into advertising, and eventually to Los Angeles, where he became design director for Saul Bass and Associates.

In 1982 he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Genocide, his film built from the reminiscences of Holocaust survivors. That same year he was appointed Director of Design for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. He later designed the official poster for four consecutive Academy Awards ceremonies. He was appointed OBE in 2002 and elected a Royal Designer for Industry in 2006.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Schwartzman became one of the most prolific documentarians of Art Deco architecture in the world. He is the author of more than a dozen books, several of them built entirely from his own photography, tracking the style from London to Paris to Miami Beach. One reviewer, describing his eye for a subject, called him a hunting dog with a Nikon, out sniffing down the finest surviving facades wherever they happen to be standing. Miami Art Deco, his sixth photographic book on the style, turned that same eye on the pastel hotels of Ocean Drive. His earlier Art Deco City gathered thirteen of what he considers the world’s most beautiful buildings, photographed himself, from the Hoover Building in London to the Central Library in Los Angeles.

His range beyond straight Art Deco is part of what makes him interesting to us. Arts and Crafts, from 2021, moved backward in design history to William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. A Persistence of Vision, published in 2005, is closer to a retrospective of his own career across design and film. He has designed murals for the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth and the UN Peace Bell Memorial in Seoul, and in 2019 he created a tiled mural for T.S. Eliot in his childhood town of Margate, which made him an Honorary Freeman of the town in 2023.

Now in his nineties, Schwartzman is still one of the very few people who have documented Art Deco across three continents with their own camera, and one of even fewer who can talk about it from inside a career that spans the Beatles, the Olympics, and the Oscars. We would love the chance to speak with him.