New York by Frank Horvat

Known for his black and white prints, especially his fashion photographs, which Les Douches la Galerie had the pleasure of exhibiting in September 2022, Frank Horvat shows that he was also an outstanding colour photographer with this series taken in New York in the 1980s. Strolling through the heart of Manhattan with its stark contrasts, Horvat draws us into his favourite themes: the human condition, the city’s toughness and its contradictory beauty. Using an 85mm lens and both Ektachrome 200 and 400 asa film, he goes beyond his usual style to grapple with the photogenic density of New York’s iconic locations. Constantly alert on the city’s streets, Horvat shows us a metropolis that is far removed from the usual cliches about the Big Apple. ‘In New York, tenderness always borders on catastrophe, mystery is the flip side of over-explicitness. I could say the same thing about myself, hence my affinity for this city and my present approach. While poetry is an ideal I don’t dare to belabour, mystery—which nevertheless goes hand in hand with poetry the way certain gods belong with certain goddesses—is an objective that I deliberately pursue, although its formulas have nothing mysterious about them.’

Frank Horvat was an outsider, as he would readily admit, and that was why New York held ‘such a dizzying attraction and fear’ for him, as his daughter Fiammetta Horvat noted when she brought this series to the fore. He tried his best to find ‘colour-moments’ that suggested stories, but without descending into sensationalism or pessimism. Neither spectacle nor terror. ‘I’d like to find juxtapositions of forms or colours that build around a gesture’. A few lines later, he states that ‘in the New York project there are still some holes that need to be filled. But I’ll only find the missing pieces in the extremes of heat, cold, fear and solitude. Not out of masochism, but because New York is a city of extremes. Even inanimate objects like facades, rubbish, shop windows, graffiti, that aren’t meant to change with the seasons, seem to lose their meaning in the warmth of spring’. This series, entitled Side Walk, was put out by Atelier EXB, in October 2020, a few days after Frank Horvat’s passing, at the age of ninety-two and thus became the last of his books published during his lifetime.