2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
At 17, photography, to me, wasn’t even a worst-case scenario. A class-mate had persuaded me to swap my stamp collection for a second-hand Retinamat, which he reckoned would be more effective for picking up girls. It did in fact work better than stamp collecting, but not quite as well as a love poem. Still, taking up photography meant that I could recycle my albums, by pasting 24x36 contact prints in place of the stamps, after trimming them to improve their composition, so that they became even smaller than the stamps they replaced. Cartier-Bresson, whose doctrine I hadn’t yet discovered, would doubtlessly have disapproved – even if my trimming showed that composition was already on my mind. Of course, I was only taking my first steps: the Retinamat forced me to guess when setting the distance, the exposure or the lens opening. I neither had a darkroom nor a choice of lenses, I had never seen a book or an exhibition about photography, and Life Magazine wasn’t yet available in Switzerland, which was still surrounded by German armies. The only professional photographer I had ever met was the man from around the corner, who did passport photos and wedding portraits, and in spite of my lack of experience I realised that he wasn’t exactly cutting edge.
