2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
Life had finally arrived in the newsstands, imitated throughout the ‘free world’ by magazines such as Match in Paris, Stern in Hamburg and Epoca in Milan. I admired the Magnum photographers – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour and Werner Bischof – both as artists and as adventurers. Far from being a worst-case scenario, photojournalism now seemed to me a way to combine my dreams of creativity with my desire to know the world. Guido Almansi, a comrade of mine who wanted to be a writer and who did, in fact, become a well-known author, obtained an appointment with Alberto Mondadori, the director of Epoca, and sold him the idea of a story on the reading habits of the people in Abruzzi, a region known for being particularly backward: Guido would write and I make the photos. To be honest, the subject did not strike me as being all that photogenic, but Alberto Mondadori was the son of Italy’s biggest publisher and the reading habits of Italians interested him. Still, he didn’t take much of a risk by saying ‘Go ahead, I’ll publish it if I like it.’ I staked a lot more by asking my employer for a few days off and by laying out my money for the expenses. The story was published and some assignments followed.
