Before Frank Horvat helped drag fashion photography out of the studio and into the street, he spent two years on the road in India and Pakistan with a 35mm camera. Those negatives are the subject of Frank Horvat. The Birth of a Photographer / La naissance d’un regard, a book from Kehrer Verlag that gathers around one hundred black-and-white photographs from the trips for the first time.
Horvat was 25 when he set out in 1952. Born in Abbazia, Italy (now Opatija, Croatia) in 1928, he had arrived in Switzerland during the Second World War as a young Hungarian Jewish refugee, and it was there that he first encountered Indian soldiers, the meeting that pointed him east. He spent two years photographing rituals, landscapes and people, and returned to India in 1962. The 1962 Calcutta frames sit in the same book as the 1952 Lahore ones, which makes the volume a study of how a decade changes a way of looking.
The pictures themselves resist the exotic. A husband discovering his wife’s face in a mirror in Lahore. A bazaar, also in Lahore. The stone instruments of the Jantar Mantar observatory in New Delhi. A man praying in Bombay. Women listening to a Vinoba Bhave speech in Bihar in 1953. It is reportage, but reportage with the compositional patience that would later make his fashion work so unusual. He was among the first to apply the 35mm film camera and reportage techniques to fashion art photography.
One image from this period has a place in photographic history. Horvat’s photograph of a bride, taken in Pakistan in 1952, was selected by Edward Steichen for The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. By the time Horvat came back from Asia, his work had already been published in Europe and the United States, and an international reputation was under way.
What the book publishes, then, is an origin story that Horvat himself endorsed. “It seems to me that these images ‘go beyond the subject’, and more generally, that this trip was the true starting point of my journey as a photographer,” he said.
The edition details:
- Titles: Frank Horvat. The Birth of a Photographer (English edition) and La naissance d’un regard (French edition)
- Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, 2026
- Price: €48.00 per edition
- Format: 176 pages, 24 × 30 cm, half-cloth hardcover
- Plates: 95 black-and-white and 8 color photographs
- Edited by: Karine Lisbonne, with texts by Frank Horvat, Ranjit Hoskoté and Peter Pfrunder
- ISBN: 978-3-96900-202-5 (English), 978-3-96900-221-6 (French)
Horvat, who was briefly a member of the American picture agency Magnum, is remembered for the fashion pictures he published between the mid-1950s and the end of the 1980s, but his output also ran through photojournalism, portraiture, landscape, nature and sculpture. He kept working with new tools, digital cameras and Photoshop among them, and kept publishing and exhibiting until his death in 2020 at the age of 92. As of September 2026, both editions are listed as in stock on the publisher’s site.
