Born in 1928 in Italy, forced into exile by the Italian Fascist regime and its anti-Jewish laws, Frank Horvat spent his adolescence in Switzerland before heading out into the world, camera in hand. Paris became one of his first stops, where he made the decisive encounter with Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1951. Pakistan, India, Israel, Jordan and then London would follow, the subjects of his first reports and the objects of his first publications in the press. Settling in Paris in 1955, at the age of twenty-seven, he approached the city as a photojournalist.

The history of photography – and more broadly, of representations – is marked by these forced or voluntary displacements, these exiled views. What does a young man who grew up in the Swiss mountains and roamed India perceive of Paris? What imaginary does he project into the city’s outline? How will he invest the city’s light and shadow to make an image of it in his turn?

Frank Horvat, who passed away in 2020, produced an abundant body of work. The present exhibition is focused on the Parisian corpus of his work produced during the 1950s. Combining reporting and fashion series, it reveals a city caught between the back alleys of a past century and the large buildings of tomorrow, between mythical sites and the underworld. We will meet there lovers on the banks of the Seine, Anna Karina in a Dior dress in the middle of Les Halles, anonymous passers on crowded sidewalks, and Frank Horvat, fascinated by “the magic of the box”, walking back and forth between crowds and individuals, on the lookout for moments of intimacy that the urban vertigo hides so well.

Exhibition in collaboration with the Studio Frank Horvat.

Photograph : Frank Horvat, Paris with a telephoto lens, Saint-Lazare, 1956. Courtesy of Studio Frank Horvat.

Free admission
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