2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
Today, twenty years after I took my last fashion photos, I feel as though their ‘timelessness’ – as I liked to think of it – didn’t come so much from what I added to the young women wearing those garments (such as the street anecdotes, or the unexpected accessories, or the extras who surrounded them), as from what I took off, more often than not against their will and against the conventions of the genre. Such as the over-elaborate hairstyles, the fake eyelashes, the heavy make-up, and above all the stereotyped expressions and poses, which they believed made them look chic (or nonchalant or sensual). It was as if, having found an opportunity to take these girls in my arms, I were pushing it a step further by asking them to undress. And – when I think back at it – for rather similar reasons. So I commanded them – rather awkwardly – ‘to be natural’, though what I really wished was for them to exist, rather than just to pretend. More often than not, this mental disrobing upset them, because they felt I was trying to deprive them of what they thought of as their assets. But when I look again at these few dozen fashion photos I still like, selected out of the thousands I took, it seems to me that what sets them apart and places them outside the reach of time and trends, is precisely this ambiguity, this back-and-forth between appearance and essence. Or, if you prefer, between staging a situation and catching a decisive moment.
