French photographer Frank Horvat’s series New York Up and Down, 1982-1986 is shown to the public for the first time in its entirety. This is happening in Antwerp, Belgium.
Frank Horvat, born in 1928 in the Italian city of Abbazia, which is now the Croatian city of Opatija, has never cared much for borders. His life has been full of migrations, beginning in the late 1930s, when the war forced his family to seek refuge in Switzerland. From there he watched the world tear itself apart.
When the chaos died down, he moved to Paris and later to Boulogne, “for the space and rent,” and began taking his first photographic expeditions: India, Pakistan, Israel, Japan, Egypt, the United States, England, Italy. He was crossing both national and photographic borders. Horvat did it all: photojournalism, fashion photography, landscapes, animals, still life and digital. Today it’s almost held against him: he doesn’t fit easily into a box, and resists the categorization that has bogged down photography over the years.
We have to go back to understand his vision. It was in Paris in 1950 that Horvat met Henri Cartier-Bresson in the Magnum offices, who was—and always will be—his biggest influence he showed his first pictures made with a Rolleiflex “your eyes are not on a level with your stomach you understand nothing go to the Louvre and look at the paintings of Nicolas Poussin to learn what composition is all about“.He however nuanced his advice. For lack of courage, which Horvat readily admits, he never photographed wars. His travel photographs are as much explorations of other countries as of the human condition.
Horvat is known primarily as a fashion photographer, his work has been praised for its reality. Like his contemporary William Klein, Horvat was among the first, beginning in 1957, to photograph his models in the street, in crowds or inside apartments. The choice was made more by necessity than conviction: at the time, he only knew how to shoot in 35mm, and lacked his own studio. By applying his talents to fashion photography, Horvat turned the industry’s standards upside-down, infuriating editors and stylists. “I was really interested in girls,” he says. “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.”
Through the years New York has inspired many great photographers. Joel Meyerowitz, Bruce Davidson and Saul Leiter are just a few of the grandmasters of street photography who proclaimed the city as their favorite subject. Horvat, who never permanently lived in New York, benefited from his outsider position to create a series of images that could still surprise the viewer. Drawing from his background as a fashion photographer and photojournalist, he was able to establish another portrait, both aesthetic and humanistic, of this over-documented city.
His 1980s series New York Up and Down is a personal homage to the vibrant metropole in all its facets, from ‘posh’ ladies suntanning in Central Park or sipping coffee behind a café window, to shabby graffiti-clad subways and homeless people seeking a place to sleep.
At the time New York suffered high criminality rates and many neighborhoods had virtually become no-go zones. By choosing to point his camera at the highs as well as the lows, Horvat managed to capture the specific atmosphere and raw reality of New York eighties.
This nostalgic trip down memory lane to a city that no longer exists, is reinforced by the grainy quality of the prints and the typical Kodachrome colors. For Horvat, who seldom used color and this almost exclusively for his personal projects, the bustling life in the Big Apple encouraged him, for the first time, to fully explore the possibilities of color photography.
Jonas Cuénin
Eighties New York, by Frank Horvat
February 9th – April 7th 2018
Zirkstraat 20
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
www.gallery51.com
