HORVATLAND - THE '60s - FASHION & ILLUSTRATION - HARPER'S BAZAAR USAGO TO HOME

2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland

I soon realized that, even in fashion photography (or at least in my kind of fashion photography) there was a decisive moment. To make a professional model look like a ‘real woman’ – i.e. to make her believable and therefore loveable – it wasn’t enough just to strip off her layers of artifice. What was needed was the miracle of a gesture, of a stray wisp of hair, of a camera angle, of a ray of light… At any rate, this was what I wished to believe and what I would have told Cartier-Bresson, had I known how to say it, and had he been willing to listen. Some editors and art directors spurred me on, like Hélène Lazareff, of Elle, who sent me on a fashion shoot in a village of Central France – a ‘first’ that may be compared, in the earthly context of women’s magazines, to the first steps on the moon. Or like Marvin Israel, of Harper’s Bazaar, who let me loose in the streets of New York. I was so excited about photographing for the same magazine as Avedon, that I spent a whole morning (and used up more than a dozen rolls) on single rather dreary suit by a New York ready-to-wear designer. The highpoint of these efforts were my photos of Italian high fashion, in 1962. However, I now wonder if what made them successful is really what I thought to be ‘a moment of truth’, or if it wasn’t rather all the trouble I took (and the compromises I had to find) in order to comply with the demands by the editor-in-chief, Nancy White. I had succeeded to book Deborah Dixon, one of Avedon’s top models and, in my eyes, the most beautiful. But Nancy’s idea of ‘elegance’ was immense hats and a thick coat of lipstick (‘or else Revlon might cancel their ads’). Anyone, looking now at these photos, would say that the last thing this blond model makes one think of is a 'real woman’ – but perhaps it was my quixotic and obsessive desire to see her as ‘real’, and the fact that I had to fight so hard to overcome the magazine’s conventions, that makes these photographs work. Anyhow, Nancy was pleased and commissioned me, that same year, to photograph the high fashion in Paris. But my own feeling was that I was nearing the end of this particular road.