Review of the exhibition of photographer Frank Horvath “Paris, world, fashion” at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris

Paris’s Jeu de Paume exhibits Paris, World, Fashion: a black-and-white history of the life and travels of photographer Frank Horvath (1928–2020). The author’s gaze was caught by a Kommersant correspondent in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

The son of German immigrants, born long before World War II in Italian Abbazia, now Croatian Opatija, Frank Horvath is our contemporary. Just three years ago you could meet him at photographic salons, where he would roll in on wheels, in his own chair.

He didn’t mind boasting that he had lived in six countries and spoke four languages: “I always liked to change one country for another, one language for another, one manner for another.” You can guess that not all shifts were voluntary. Francesco Horvath gave the name Frank during his long flight and search for a new homeland. He hid from the war in Italian Switzerland, in Lugano. The family was lucky; the mother, a German Jew, escaped the inevitable deportation in Italy and saved her son. After the war, Horvath studied to become an artist at Milan’s Brera Academy, but turned off the straight path, falling in love with photography, which promised faster earnings and a more colorful life. Every photographer has a sentimental story about their first camera, like their first love. So, Horvath’s parents didn’t give it to him; in order to finally acquire it, he sold the most expensive thing he had, a collection of stamps. But just as postage stamps had told him about other countries before, the camera marked the beginning of a life of travel. He couldn’t sit still. His favorite order is a trip to the ends of the earth. Illustrated magazines loved to send their photographers to, I don’t know where, where they could bring new photographic impressions for readers who themselves had not traveled anywhere, those were not the times.

Based on his travels and impressions, he met and even briefly became friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson. The young artist became a member of the photographic Masonic lodge, Magnum agency. But over time I felt uncomfortable there. The Croatian was too free-spirited, secular, fashionable and – what a shame – he took orders for fashion shoots from women’s magazines. I had to part with Magnum. But thanks to his experience as a reporter, he came to the world of fashion not only with his own view, but also with his own technique.

While fashion shoots were carried out with a bulky large-format camera both in the studio and on the street, Horvath agreed to work only with a portable Leica. He took his models out onto the street, seated them at cafe tables, and squeezed them into the subway. He forced the girls who came to him for filming, carefully made up, to wash and dishevel, deliberately teasing them, driving them crazy, right into his lens.

In fashion, he worked for British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar until he got tired of fashion and returned to magazines as a chronicler. Thus the circle is completed. Because of his love for fashion, he left Magnum, a sect dedicated to photography and photojournalism, and because of his love for photojournalism, he quarreled with the publishers of illustrated fashion magazines.

The tasks of photographers changed along with the advent of documentary films and, scary to say, television. He made the last trip that the magazines sent him on, passing through Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Tokyo. Everywhere he photographed not landscapes, but people, trying to see the strangest and most non-tourist places, like port taverns, where Indian women meet sailors. Judging by the glances he caught from his heroines, exhausted during the night, he knew how to look, remaining not so much unnoticed, but not a stranger.

Magazines began to order him exotic trips within Paris. He was assigned to film a report on prostitution and pimps, during which he had to work like Commissioner Maigret, but he was never ambushed by either the police or criminals. The next report is about striptease dancers in the Sphinx cabaret, where he was both a spectator in the hall and a confidential person behind the scenes. The fact that he was accepted as one of their own is evidenced by the very complimentary portrait of Horvath himself shown at the exhibition, made on his own camera by a girl from the Sphinx.

During these same years, he acquired new optics. Literally. In the late 1950s, Horvath began experimenting with a telephoto lens, looking at Paris from above and zooming in on faces, signs, and road signs. It was a path from a portrait of a person to a portrait of a city, where a single glance was made up of hundreds of glances. By that time, Horvath had changed from an eternal wanderer to a Parisian, settling on the borders of the city in a huge workshop that he had rebuilt for himself from an old warehouse in Boulogne-Billancourt. His daily models were homemade. “Being part of his family meant becoming part of his photographic archive,” said his daughter Fiammetta Horvath. “He always photographed us, in any way, naked, angry, sobbing.”

Having lost an eye, Horvath could no longer rely on his vision, but he became interested in new possibilities when working with computers, and even created his own application for the iPad. But he wrote books, publishing his interviews with outstanding photographers and his friends, illustrated with their portraits. Was it not this work that made him once say to himself: “I am the most unknown of famous photographers!”