Frank Horvat
(1928 - )
Frank Horvat was born in Italy in 1928. During World War II he moved to Switzerland where at the age of fifteen he studied photography. During the late 1940s he went back to Italy where he studied art and worked in advertising. He eventually became a freelance magazine photographer.
Horvat moved to Paris and joined the Black Star agency, known for its photojournalists, in 1956. In 1957, he began his fashion career when William Klein introduced him to Jardin des Modes, one of the most adventurous fashion magazines in Europe. In 1959, Horvat joined Magnum and in 1961 he began working for Harper's Bazaar. Horvat replaced the goddess-model of the time with lively, unmade-up models (a girlish "bird" or "dolly" who could rock with the camera crew all night and display her romantic despair to the lens the next day). Following the tastes of the culture during the 1960s and 1970s, fashion photography evoked news coverage of the periods's rock concerts, with the air of authenticity that half-light and blurred, uninhibited figures conveyed. Freelancing Horvat traveled to France where he met Cartier-Bresson and Capa; Pakistan and India, and England where he worked for Life and Picture Post.
In the 1970s, Horvat focused on subjects such as trees, townscapes, sculptures, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. He has experimented with digital imaging since the late 1980s, while his visual diary A Daily Report: 1999, served as a reminder of his credentials as a documentary photographer.
