HORVATLAND - THE '50s - PHOTOJOURNALISM - PARIS BY TELE LENSGO TO HOME
2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
In my own small way, I always tried to extend the boundaries of photography, as much as the technologies of the time allowed. This led me to take night shots with a hand-held camera, with exposures up to ½ of a second – which often produced blur. Or to do close-ups with my lens wide open – which got the eyes sharp, but left the tip of the nose out of focus. Or to overdevelop – which increased the grain. As a result, you can’t always ‘count every hair’ in my pictures, for instance in those at the Sphynx, and even less in the ones I took with a 400mm tele-lens called Novoflex, which was brought out in those years and looked like a bazooka. It had a grip like a gun, and the focus was set by a kind of trigger – which cost a fellow reporter his life, when he pointed it at a Russian tank during the Budapest uprising. I didn’t run that risk in the streets of Paris, but this new instrument created as many problems as it solved. Its advantage, from my point of view, was that it allowed to show an aspect of Paris that had always fascinated me: this city seems to present millions of facets, all jammed together, interwoven and condensed, as if one was looking through a kaleidoscope. A long lens emphasises this impression, as if the distances between the objects was reduced. One of its drawbacks is that it tends to amplify the slightest wobbling of the camera, so that if you hold it by hand – rather than placing it on a tripod – you have to reduce the exposure to less than a 400th of a second. Moreover, the depth of focus is minimal, so that to show all those facets and to convey the kaleidoscopic effect, you have to close the diaphragm all the way. To a reader of the present automated age, these explanations may sound obscure… In short, my only choice was to use a very fast film and to over-develop it: which meant getting grain as big as pebbles, as one can notice in some of these shots.