THE OUTSIDE VIEW: Frank Horvat’s dream was to affix the distinguished Magnum photo agency and travel the world as a photojournalist. As a substitute, he ended up within the glossy pages of fashion magazines, bringing a naturalistic approach to his shoots for publications starting from Vogue to Harper’s Bazaar.

That journey is documented in “Frank Horvat: Paris, the World, Fashion” on the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, the primary major exhibition dedicated to the Italian-born photographer since his death in 2020 on the age of 92.

The show, which opens Friday, features iconic images alongside lesser-known and previously unseen photographs from the archives kept in his studio-home in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, now managed by his daughter Fiammetta Horvat.

Frank Horvat settled in France in 1955 after spending his teenage years in Switzerland, having fled Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s racial laws targeting Jews, amongst others. He began his profession working for news magazines like Epoca in Italy and Réalités in France.

Curator Virginie Chardin noted he was faithful to certain signatures, whether he was covering a marriage in Pakistan or spotlighting the newest styles from Givenchy. The human gaze anchors a lot of his shots, with subjects looking directly on the photographer, or reflected in a mirror.

“He was very introspective. His mother was a psychoanalyst, so he was someone who at all times questioned the meaning of what he was doing,” she said. “He often worked with no flash, without artificial light. That’s why the photographs are very grainy. That’s really his style: he loved moody atmospheres.”

A consummate outsider, Horvat may possibly have been considered one of the world’s most reluctant fashion photographers.

Spotted by William Klein, who was intrigued by his cityscapes shot with a telephoto lens, he began to work for Jardin des Modes and quickly wowed the industry with images like his 1957 shot of model Tan Arnold standing on the counter of a bustling Paris restaurant in a cocktail dress and an extended string of pearls.

“Within the space of just a number of years, between 1957 and 1960, he became a star photographer,” Chardin said.

Horvat heralded a full of life, humorous reportage style that broke with the formal elegance of the period’s fashion photography. “It was very recent on the time. Two or three years later, everyone was doing it,” the curator noted. “It coincides with the appearance of ready-to-wear and the evolution of the status of girls. It was chatting with women who work, who’re lively.”

Indeed, a lot of Horvat’s models had a wealthy life story. He cultivated relationships with the likes of Simone d’Aillencourt, Deborah Dixon and Benedetta Barzini, whom he liked to photograph with the artists and intellectuals of their time.

One particularly striking series for Harper’s Bazaar features Dixon alongside filmmaker Federico Fellini and actor Marcello Mastroianni, while Iris Bianchi is pictured with director Agnès Varda and wonder mogul Helena Rubinstein, amongst others.  

“He hated doll-like models. They’d to be real women,” Chardin said. “He would at all times fight with fashion editors to forestall the models from striking ridiculous poses.”

Unlike David Bailey or Richard Avedon, Horvat didn’t cultivate fame and quickly became disillusioned with fashion photography. “I feel he should have felt a bit of isolated in fashion,” said his daughter. “At the moment, everyone was putting on music and it was very ‘swinging’ fashion. He wasn’t like that in any respect. He comes across as very serious.”

Though his try and return to photojournalism within the early ‘60s was unsuccessful, it yielded a few of the show’s most intriguing images: melancholic and surreal shots taken during an eight-month trip to locations including Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv and Hong Kong.

After that, Horvat devoted more time to non-public projects, including experiments with digital imagery on the crossroads between photography and painting. “He drew incredibly well, he wrote incredibly well. He spoke six languages, so he was at all times restless because he was impatient,” Fiammetta Horvat recalled.

“Whenever you read his diaries, you realize he was in a type of everlasting identity crisis, but not in a negative way,” she added. “He at all times needed to challenge all the pieces, so he turned the page in a short time, each personally and professionally.”