2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland.
I was 15 when I took my first photograph of a sculpture – a small marble torso that my mother used as a paperweight. And 22 when the art director of Réalités, Bertie Gilou, sent me to Florence to photograph the bronzes by Donatello (who at the time, for me, was just a name). And 25 when I rented a fishing boat in Bombay, which dropped me off on the island of Elephanta and returned to fetch me three days later. Presently these caves, where the 7-metre high heads of Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu are carved out of the rock, must be swarming with tourists. But in 1953 I was there all by myself, waiting for the moment when the light of day, coming from the entrance of the cave and more or less reflected by the few polished surfaces, would allow me to distinguish some details. The experience was even more powerful than that of my only night in Cairo, a year earlier, when I had hired a taxi to drive me to the Pyramids, and the lonely Sphynx, with not a single human being around, had appeared to me suddenly, out of the mist.
