Frank Horvat Explained

Frank Horvat
Birth Date:28 April 1928
Birth Place:Abbazia, Italy (today Opatija, part of Croatia)
Death Place:Paris, France
Occupation:Photographer
Known For:Fashion photography

Frank Horvat (28 April 1928 – 21 October 2020) was an Italian photographer who lived and worked in France. He is best known for his fashion photography, published between the mid 1950s and the late 1980s. Horvat's photographic opus includes photojournalism, portraiture, landscape, nature, and sculpture.[1] He was the recipient of the Fondazione del Centenario Award in 2010 for his contributions to European culture.

He has collaborated with fellow photographers such as Don McCullin, Robert Doisneau, Sarah Moon, Helmut Newton, and Marc Riboud. In the 1990s, he was one of the first major photographers to experiment with technology including photoshop.

Early life

Horvat was born in Abbazia, Italy (now Opatija, Croatia), on 28 April 1928, into a Jewish family from Central Europe.[2] His father, Karl, was a Hungarian general physician, and his mother, Adele, was a psychiatrist from Vienna. At the age of 11, in 1939, his family moved to Lugano in Switzerland, fleeing fascism in Italy.[3] He went on to study fine art at Brera Academy in Milan.[4] Horvat lived in several countries including Switzerland, Italy, Pakistan, India, England, and the United States, before settling in France in 1955.[5]

Career

1950s

Horvat started his career in the mid 1950s as a photojournalist in Paris, working to capture the 'sleaze and squalor' of the city, before going on to fashion photography.[6] He acknowledged having been strongly influenced by French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.[7] After meeting him in 1950, he followed his advice and replaced his Rollei with a Leica camera and embarked on a two-year journey through Asia as a free-lance photojournalist. His photographs from this trip were published by Life, Réalités, Match, Picture Post, Die Woche, and Revue. His photograph of an Indian bride under a veil, her face reflected in a mirror on her lap, was selected by Edward Steichen for The Family of Man exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art which toured the world to be seen by 9 million visitors.[8]

In 1955, Horvat moved from London to Paris and found that the mood of its streets and its inhabitants had little in common with the somewhat romantic vision of the so-called humanist photographers. In 1957, Horvat shot fashion photographs for Jardin des Modes using a 35-mm camera and available light,[9] which formerly had rarely been used for fashion. This innovation was welcomed by ready-to-wear designers, because it presented their creations in the context of everyday life. In the following years, Horvat was commissioned to do similar work for Elle in Paris, Vogue in London, and Harper’s Bazaar in New York.[5]

1960s and 1970s

Between 1962 and 1963, Horvat turned to photojournalism and took a trip around the world for the German magazine Revue. Then he experimented with cinema and video. In 1976, he decided to "become his own client" by producing three personal projects: Portraits of Trees (1976–82), Very Similar (1982-86) and New York Up and Down (1982–87), which he called his "triptych".[10]

1980s

In this period, Horvat went on towards color photography including his series New York Up and Down, where he extensively shot portraits of passengers on New York's subway systems and coffee shops. This was also period when his eyesight started to fail from an eye disease. It was then that he began a new project, a series of interviews with fellow photographers, such as Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Mario Giacomelli, Josef Koudelka, Don McCullin, Sarah Moon, Helmut Newton, Marc Riboud, Jeanloup Sieff and Joel-Peter Witkin. They were published in France under the title Entre Vues.[11]

1990s

In the 1990s, Horvat became interested in computer technology and produced Yao the Cat (1993), Bestiary (1994), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1995). He transgressed the Cartier-Bressonian rule of the "decisive moment" by combining parts of images shot at different times and in different places.[12] Several years later, he produced A Trip to Carrara.[13] This was also the period that he was one of the first photographers to experiment with Photoshop.[14]

Themes

Women played a central thematic role in his fashion journalistic works, with a focus on realism. Speaking about women in his photography and his emphasis on natural looks, he said, “I was interested in women. I wanted to show what I liked about them. They would spend two hours in the makeup chair, and I’d try to get them to remove it so they’d look more natural.” In his own words, he kept away from pictures of war, disease, and suffering, "not out of indifference to these misfortunes, but because I feel neither the moral justification nor the physical courage to face such situations as a photographer.” However, his early photojournalistic works of Paris, had him focus on the city's seedy underbelly to counter the 'heavily romanticized' depictions of the city.

Later years

Horvat's later projects were perhaps his most personal. 1999 is a photo-diary of the last year of the millennium, shot with a tiny analog camera designed for amateurs.[15] Entre Vues and La Véronique were taken with the first digital Nikon within a 30-meter range,[13] either inside his home in Provence or in its immediate surroundings.[16] Eye at the Fingertips, which was started in 2006, was photographed with a digital compact camera.[17] His latest enterprise was an iPad application called Horvatland, which contains more than 2,000 photos produced over the course of 65 years with ten hours of commentary.[18] He received the Fondazione del Centenario Award (based in Lugano, Switzerland) in 2010, for his contribution to European culture.[19]

Horvat's latest book, Side Walk, showcasing life in New York city in the 1980s, is to be published on 26 October 2020.[20] He died on 21 October 2020 at the age of 92.[5] [21]

Publications

Exhibitions

Filmography

Notes and References

  1. Contemporary photographers, dir. Martin Marix Evans, article "Horvat Frank", St James Press, Detroit, 1995, pp 508–511.
  2. Web site: Frank Horvat, Fashion Photographer and Photojournalist, Dies at 92. 24 October 2020. sports.yahoo.com. 21 October 2020 . en-US.
  3. Web site: Keystone-SDA/ts. Frank Horvat, portrait photographer of women, dies aged 92. 24 October 2020. SWI swissinfo.ch. 22 October 2020 . en.
  4. Web site: 22 October 2020. Frank Horvat, groundbreaking fashion photographer, dies aged 92. 24 October 2020. the Guardian. en.
  5. News: Frank Horvat, groundbreaking French photographer, dies aged 92. Tim. Jonze. 22 October 2020. 22 October 2020. The Guardian. London.
  6. Web site: 22 October 2020. Frank Horvat, groundbreaking fashion photographer, dies aged 92. 24 October 2020. the Guardian. en.
  7. News: L'esprit frondeur de Frank Horvat PM. 15 April 2017. PM. 20 April 2017. fr-FR. 18 May 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170518103550/http://photographemarocain.com/lesprit-frondeur-de-frank-horvat/. dead.
  8. Book: Steichen, Edward . Sandburg, Carl . Norman, Dorothy . Lionni, Leo . Mason, Jerry . Stoller, Ezra . Museum of Modern Art (New York) . The family of man: The photographic exhibition . 1955 . Published for the Museum of Modern Art by Simon and Schuster in collaboration with the Maco Magazine Corporation .
  9. Camera, monthly international magazine about photography, éd. C. J. Bucher, Lucerne, Swiss, 1957.
  10. DE PACE Loredana, "Il labirinto di Horvat" in Foto cult, nov 2011, year VIII, n 82, pp 68–74
  11. Book: Horvat, Frank. Entre vues. Nathan. 1990. 9782092400333.
  12. BERNARD Hervé, Frank Horvat, le tirage sur ordinateur", Photographie, n. 1494, May 1992, pp 24–27.
  13. May 2018. Premio Mediterraneum per la Fotografia d'Autore. Catalogo Mostre personali Med Photo Fest 2018. Syracuse, Sicily. Associazione Culturale Mediterraneum. 11 May 2018. 10. 4. 23 October 2020.
  14. Web site: LensCulture. Frank Horvat . Frank Horvat. 24 October 2020. LensCulture.
  15. Book: Horvat, Frank. 1999: A Daily Report. Dewi Lewis Publishing. 2000. 9781899235186.
  16. News: Frank Horvat, Fashion Photographer and Photojournalist, Dies at 92. Mimosa. Spencer. 21 October 2020. 23 October 2020. Women's Wear Daily.
  17. News: Die Suche nach dem wahren Bild. Holger. Kreitling. 14 March 2012. 23 October 2020. Welt.
  18. News: Frank Horvat. Myrtille. Beauvert. 22 October 2020. 23 October 2020. The Eye of Photography. L’Oeil de la Photographie.
  19. Web site: Premio 2010 – Frank Horvat. 28 October 2010. 23 October 2020. Fondazione del Centenario. Lugano.
  20. Web site: Blind - The Colorful Sidewalks of New York, by Frank Horvat. 24 October 2020. www.blind-magazine.com. 17 October 2020 .
  21. Web site: Valérie. Duponchelle. 21 October 2020. Décès du photographe Frank Horvat, l'homme qui aimait les femmes. 21 October 2020. Le Figaro.fr.
  22. Web site: Frank Horvat: Goethe in Sizilien / Goethe in Sicilia. 23 October 2020. Casa di Goethe. Rome.
  23. Book: Horvat, Frank. Homenatge a Catalunya. Fundació Vila Casas. 2002.
  24. Web site: Bibliography. 23 October 2020. Horvatland.
  25. Web site: Frank Horvat. 23 October 2020. Izzy Gallery. Toronto. https://web.archive.org/web/20200107221436/http://izzygallery.com/frank-horvat. 7 January 2020.
  26. News: Frank Horvat. Sophie. De Santis. 4 November 2009. 23 October 2020. Le Figaro. Paris. https://web.archive.org/web/20150927070044/https://www.lefigaro.fr/arts-expositions/2009/11/04/03015-20091104ARTFIG00041-frank-horvat-.php. 27 September 2015.
  27. News: Photography Exhibition: Frank Horvat, New York Up and Down, 1982–1986. 2018. 23 October 2020. The Eye of Photography. L’Oeil de la Photographie.
  28. Web site: Seravezza Fotografia XI Edizione 2014.
  29. Web site: Le Procédé Fresson. 23 October 2020. film-documentaire.fr.
  30. Web site: 1992–2001 Arte 10 ans. 23 October 2020. Arte. Strasbourg. https://web.archive.org/web/20190822161955/https://www.arte.tv/sites/fr/corporate/files/1992-2001_ARTE_10ans_FR.pdf. 22 August 2019.
  31. Consulate General of France in Vancouver. 30 January 2013. Fashion Horvat: Frank Horvat Exhibition in North Vancouver. fr. 23 October 2020. YouTube.

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