Virginie Chardin – författare

A compact survey of the photographer Frank Horvat, best known for his fashion photography published between the mid 1950s and the late 1980s. Frank Horvat (1928-2020) changed the course of fashion photography forever. The Italian-born photographer made his debut as a photojournalist in France, where he continued to live and work for the rest of his life. It was here he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, who encouraged him to continue his marvellous photojournalism. By the mid-1950s Horvat was collaborating with the biggest fashion magazines in the world, such as Elle, Vogue and Jardin des Modes – revolutionizing fashion photography through a more realistic lens, photographing models on the streets, in the squares and alongside the locals of post-war Europe. Horvat’s fresh and often imitated style, which brought reportage techniques and the 35mm film camera to the forefront of fashion photography, impressed designers and inspired fashion photographers for generations to come. Frank Horvat’s work can now be found in permanent collections in prestigious institutions around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. With a foreword by Virginie Chardin, this title in the renowned Photofile series exhibits Horvat’s photographic opus through sixty full-page reproductions in a handsome and collectible pocket format.

The perfect primer on American photographer Louis Stettner. Brooklyn-born Louis Stettner (1922–2016) first took up a camera as a teenager and went on to establish an extraordinary career that lasted almost eighty years. After photographing life on the streets of New York, he joined the famous Photo League and befriended Sid Grossman and Weegee. In the Second World War he served as a combat photographer, and the fight against fascism strengthened his faith in Marxism and the working class. Living between New York and Paris, he amassed a huge body of work that combined elements of New York street photography with lyrical humanism in the French style. His subjects were many and varied: passengers on the subway and tourists in the streets, Spanish fishermen and American beatniks, protests and demonstrations, landscapes and trees. But no matter where he found himself, he looked for beauty in the everyday and never lost his fundamental compassion and solidarity with ordinary people.