Horvat

Frank (1928). Italian photographer naturalized French. Born in Abbazia (a town that now belongs to Croatia), he moved to Milan when he was very young. There he studied drawing at the Brera Academy and worked as a graphic designer for an advertising agency. In 1951 he encountered photography through reportage of a pilgrimage in Southern Italy. He then moved to Paris where he met Robert Capa and Henry Cartier–Bresson, who encouraged him to continue with photography. After selling his first work sold to Epoca, he traveled as a photo-reporter through India, Europe, and the USA, publishing his work in Paris Match, Picture Post, and Life. In the second half of the 1950s, he became interested in the world of fashion. He approached it with a fresh and dynamic style, deliberately contaminating the static reportage style, which characterized fashion photography up until that point. His black and white pictures featured refined backgrounds, in which elegance dominated with a light touch. Jacques Moutin, artistic director of Jardin des Modes, offered him a collaboration. Since then Horvat has also been published in Glamour, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Vogue. Starting in the 1970s, he became interested in digital techniques with which he constructed highly fanciful images (from the fairytale Puss in Boots to Virtual Beast where he set exotic animals in the urban background of Paris) as expressly ‘disconnected from the time-space relationship’. He lives and works in France.