The only thing that truly interests me in a photo is the miracle. That something happened at that moment that can never happen again. And I’m astonished by those miracles.
Frank Horvat, one of the founding fathers of French fashion photography died aged 92 on 22 Oct 2020.
He worked as a fashion photographer and photojournalist, and kicked off his career shooting the seedy underbelly of street life of Paris. His photograpghy covered a diversity of people and situations from a beggar in India in 1953, French strippers at the Sphinx club in 1956, subway commuters in New York City in the Eighties to intimate shots of life at his country house for a project he called La Véronique in 2003.
His reportage style, incorporating bustling street life into his shots of models and designers, helped shake up the genre and had a lasting effect on the fashion industry – even if this work disappointed his early mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson, who labelled it “pastiche”.
Born on April 28, 1928, in Abbazia, Italy — which is now called Opatija and is part of Croatia — Horvat acquired his first camera as a teenager, trading in a stamp collection for a 35mm Retinamat. After studying fine art at the Brera Academy in Milan, he made his first trip to Paris in 1950, where he met Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.
A meeting in 1950 with Cartier-Bresson in Paris proved pivotal to his photographic career, encouraging him to adopt the Leica camera and take a two-year trip to India, during which he experienced his first success.
By the mid-1950s he had moved to Paris, working first as a photojournalist capturing the sleaze and squalor of the French capital, before turning to fashion photography, injecting what had become a staid genre with a similar dose of realism.
Horvat spent the late Fifties and early Sixties shuttling between Paris, New York and London. He was a Magnum photographer and worked for Life and Paris Match, and also shot fashion photos for Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar.
His reportage-style fashion shoots of top models and designers often included lively street life and have become classics.
He spent time in Asia, and was sent around the world for the German magazine Revue. When magazines began to disappear in the Seventies, he embarked on freelance projects.
Horvat’s later work included branching into colour photography with projects such as his 1980s series New York Up & Down, which saw him turn his lens on the city’s subway passengers and coffee shops. Horvat’s work became so varied it was difficult to pigeonhole, covering everything from trees to sculpture to his own home in Provence. When his eyesight started to fail in one eye during the mid-80s, he began interviewing other photographers he admired, such as Don McCullin and Sarah Moon.
Horvat embraced much of photography’s changes, including the advent of digital, social media and Photoshop, which he believed helped compensate for the loss of sight he had suffered. Horvat also set up an iPad app called Horvatland, and a Facebook page that he curated daily, uploading pairs of photos for his followers to interpret freely.
