Frank Horvat, one of the founding fathers of French fashion photography, has died aged 92.
His reportage style, incorporating bustling street life into his shots of models and designers, helped shake up the genre and had a lasting effect on the fashion industry – even if this work disappointed his early mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson, who labelled it “pastiche”.
Horvat was born in 1928 in what is now Opatija in Croatia, but at the time had been assigned to Italy and known as Abbazia. As a teenager, he traded a stamp collection for his first camera, before studying fine art at the Brera Academy in Milan. A meeting in 1950 with Cartier-Bresson in Paris proved pivotal to his photographic career, encouraging him to adopt the Leica camera and take a two-year trip to India, during which he experienced his first success. By the mid-1950s he had moved to Paris, working first as a photojournalist capturing the sleaze and squalor of the French capital, before turning to fashion photography, injecting what had become a staid genre with a similar dose of realism.
Of the models he photographed, he once said: “I was interested in women. 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.” Horvat shot the first Givenchy fashion show, and frequently travelled to New York and London on commissions for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle.
His later work included branching into colour photography with projects such as his 1980s series New York Up & Down, which saw him turn his lens on the city’s subway passengers and coffee shops. Horvat’s work became so varied it was difficult to pigeonhole, covering everything from trees to sculpture to his own home in Provence. When his eyesight started to fail in one eye during the mid-80s, he began interviewing other photographers he admired, such as Don McCullin and Sarah Moon.
In a 2014 interview with the Guardian, Horvat talked about his early years shooting the seedier side of Paris and its nightlife. “The so-called humanist photographers heavily romanticised 1950s Paris,” he said. “It didn’t look like their shots. It was poor and dilapidated, sordid and dirty. But that kind of thing can make great photographs, too.”
He also spoke of the changing photography scene, of which he had been a part for seven decades: “It isn’t just the world that has changed – the very meaning of photography has changed, too. I used to try to take pictures of things that were special, but photography is everywhere now. And nothing is special any more.”
Yet Horvat embraced much of photography’s changes, including the advent of digital, social media and Photoshop, which he believed helped compensate for the loss of sight he had suffered. His latest book, Sidewalk, will be published on 26 October.
This article was amended on 23 October 2020 to clarify details of Horvat’s hometown
