HORVATLAND - THE '50s - PHOTOJOURNALISM - PAKISTANGO TO HOME

2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland.

In fact I started my trip with Pakistan, having heard that the public relation officials of that country were providing facilities to reporters, in order to improve its negative image (which at the time still seemed improvable). So, one day in April 1952, I arrived in Karachi, stepping off a cargo that had taken three weeks to get there from Trieste – and which was cheaper than flying. I soon realised that April, in Karachi, is the beginning of high summer, that the promised facilities amounted to no more than a cup of tea with milk, that the PR people offered me while I was waiting in their office, and that those people understood as little of my English as I did of theirs. But this wasn’t my main difficulty: the difficulty was the sheer chaos of Karachi. Photography, to me, meant photojournalism. I wanted my pictures to tell stories, like those that the editors of Berliner Illustrierte, fleeing from Germany in the Thirties, had taught the editors of Life to tell to their American public, and that later all the magazines tried to tell. With a beginning, a middle and an end, and with a caption to each photo, so that readers who were still unfamiliar with the language of photography would get an idea of what the world looked like, that the circulation of the magazines would increase and that their contributors would be adequately rewarded. This was a splendid plan. But in the meantime, the streets of Karachi struck me as being nothing but a sweaty confusion, with no clear features that I could distinguish and with not so much as the beginning of a story. At least I had the sense to realise it and the luck to find another place where I could settle and begin to understand the world that surrounded me.