The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘He was always chasing empty-headed nitwits’
Photographer Frank Horvat took couture off the catwalk and out into the street – then turned his gaze on Paris’s sordid side
In 1947, when Frank Horvat was 15, he sold a precious stamp collection to buy his first camera, on the advice of a friend who assured him that taking pictures was a sure-fire way to get closer to girls. And so it proved: by the mid1950s, Horvat was photographing top models for fashion magazines in Paris, New York and beyond. After settling in London for two years in 1954, he was so in demand that he lived at Claridge’s, ordered his suits from Savile Row and drove to jobs in a white Rolls-Royce.
“He was really a big star there,” says Horvat’s daughter Fiammetta, “and he loved playing at being dashing. But that was very different from the man I knew.” Horvat, who died in 2020, had five children, of whom Fiammetta is the youngest. A former theatre designer, she now presides over her father’s archive in his former home near Paris, and has curated a retrospective of his work for this month’s Photo London photography fair.
The exhibition contrasts Horvat’s early shoots for magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Life and Picture Post – in which he set models in elaborate haute couture in incongruous, everyday situations on the street – with a more journalistic series, on Paris by night. “Poor and dilapidated” is how he later described the city, in its otherwise heavily romanticised post-war moment. “It was sordid and dirty. But that kind of thing can make great photographs, too.” Both series also feature in a second Horvat exhibition, at the Jeu de Paume museum in Tours, this June.
Horvat was born in Abbazia, Italy (now the Croatian city of Opatija), in 1928. He is less well-known in Britain than his fresh, instinctive – and much imitated – photographs merit. That’s chiefly because, in the 70-odd years he was making pictures, he diversified over and over again, trialling different subjects, styles and techniques. “He was quite a geek,” Fiammetta says. “Anything new he would immediately want to try.” Such eclecticism had its drawbacks. “Some questioned my sincerity,” Horvat said, in 2015. “Some found that my photos were hard to recognise, as if they were by 15 different authors.”
Horvat’s own mother berated him for his choice of career. “She adored him, and she supported him financially until he found his feet,” says Fiammetta, “but they argued a lot and she was very critical of what she called his running after nitwit, empty-headed ladies, which was probably true. He was always in love.”
Horvat had three sons by his first wife, Mate, plus a son from another relationship. Fiammetta, who is now 43, was six when her parents divorced, and only got to know her father in her 20s – “by which time he was less pushy, more gentle. He had been a terrible father to all of us. He travelled a lot and he was not the sort of person to live with children, anyway. He liked to be flexible. But I decided I could put my pride to one side and see what was good about him.”
To begin with, they met “maybe only once a year, but very soon it was obvious that we really got on. We discovered we liked to travel together. We knew each other’s minds. By then, he was in a mood for transferring knowledge, for tell