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Frank Horvat is dead! One of the last giants of French photography just disappeared. We devoted a whole day to him in 2013: here it is, with a great video by Philippe Abergel made a few months ago. You will find in our archives ten other subjects or so on Frank Horvat, this extraordinary photographer! Jean-Jacques Naudet   Born in 1928 in Italy to parents who were doctors, Jews and from Central Europe, Frank Horvat lived successively in Switzerland, Italy, Pakistan, India, England and France, where he settled at the end of the 1950s. , while traveling regularly to the […]

His name: Philippe Abergel. He is a Parisian-based photographer for about thirty years and organizes workshops with Les Gobelins and the EFET schools. He also makes documentaries about photographers. Today, here is Frank Horvat!

To coincide with the release of his new book, we decided to dedicate today's edition to Frank Horvat, a photographer whose work continues to be neglected. We would like to thank Myrtille Beauvert and Jonas Cuénin for putting together this tribute.

At the end of the 1980s, you didn’t hesitate to explore digital technology. What led you to this exploration? I was lucky. I had stopped shooting fashion photography by then. A guy from Stern in Hamburg told me that with digital you could alter skin and wrinkles, take things out. 

Throughout his career, Frank Horvat has exchanged photographs with friends and fellow photographers. Over time he has built up a “little museum” representative of a certain history of photography, with works that move him and illustrate his conception of the medium. He’s agreed to speak about a few of them and share what they mean to him. Here is what he had to say.

When I was young, the woman of my dreams was tall and slender, and certainly not an intellectual. In fact, someone the exact opposite of my mother. (Sigmund Freud wouldn’t be surprised.) So the world of fashion was a kind of Promised Land where every model I photographed seemed to have come from the same mold. Alas, they were covered in dresses, coats, hats and other junk rarely to my taste. But that’s what they were paid to wear and that’s what I was paid to shoot.

Photography, as everyone knows, means “writing with light.” What Niépce and Daguerre started out doing almost two centuries ago, and what a billion people today do with their mobile phones. But as for myself, I’m almost more sensitive to light than to what it illuminates. To the point that I almost avoid using a flash, and I often will refuse to shoot an interesting subject if the lighting doesn’t bring it to the fore.

In a strict sense, the voyeur is someone who seeks sexual pleasure with their eyes. In a broader sense, it is someone who want to possess with their eyes, not necessarily for sexual ends. In this sense, every photographer is a voyeur, and voyeurism is one of the “keys” to my house.

Calling a photo dumb requires an explanation. But I’d like for you to find that explanation yourselves. All that I’ll say is that if some of these photos make your smile, you’re on the right track, and you’ll be able to recognize a “dumb” photo when you see it.

New York up and down was the third project of what I like to call my triptych. To begin with, this meant simply that the three are nearly contemporaneous: both Very Similar and New York up and down were begun in 1982 and concluded in 1986, Portraits of Trees was a little earlier. But choosing this word was also a kind of challenge: because, contrary to what the term triptych suggests, the three projects don’t have much in common, to the point that some people find it hard to believe that they are by the same author, and most have a preference (or a dislike) for at least one of them, as if - from whatever standpoint they are seen - there was always one that didn’t quite fit with the others.