Farewell to Frank Horvat, one of the great names in 20th century photography

The great photographer Frank Horvat, author of social, war and travel reportage also for the legendary Magnum agency, died today in Paris at the age of 92. The announcement was made by French newspaper Le Figaro: Horvat, born to a Jewish family of Hungarian descent in 1928 in Opatija (now in Croatia, then in Italy) had in fact lived in France since 1955.

An eclectic photographer, strongly inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Horvat was one of the leading fashion photographers of the 20th century, perfectly capable of capturing the glamorous spirit of his time. His innovative fashion photographs have been published since the 1950s by leading magazines, such as Vogue, Life, Match, Elle, Revue, Die Woche, and Camera. Famous, in particular, were his shoots for Elle, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar where models were placed in everyday situations.

In the 1960s, Horvat had returned to work as a photojournalist, mainly for Revue magazine, and in the 1970s he had begun to conduct personal research, with important works such as Portraits of Trees (1976-82), Very Similar (1982-86) and New York up and down (1982-87). In the 1990s he had also been among the pioneers of digital photography: in 1998 he had even replaced his equipment with a small digital camera that he always carried with him, and in 2011 he had gone so far as to produce an iPad app, called Horvatland, where he collected two thousand photographs produced over his 65-year career. This was the last major project of his career.

In Italy we remember the important monograph dedicated to him in 2018 by the Royal Museums of Turin, entitled Frank Horvat: history of a photographer, for which he himself had been the curator. His photographs have been published in dozens of books, notably, especially in recent years, by the French publisher OFF Publications. Among the awards he received was the Centenary Foundation Award (Lugano, Switzerland) for his contribution to European culture.

“A photojournalist attentive to an unknown humanity of distant worlds,” read the presentation of the Turin exhibition, “a fashion photographer who immerses his models in everyday events, he is an artist sensitive to the history of art, ready to confront painting and fascinated by sculpture. A landscape photographer attracted to the relationship between man and nature, who also engages in interior explorations, digital virtuosity and photographic research marked by the freedom of his gaze.”

Farewell to Frank Horvat, one of the great names in 20th century photography

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