HORVATLAND - THE '90s - PROJECTS - HORVAT'S BESTIARYGO TO HOME

2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland

Everyone knows that computers have transformed photography, just as they have transformed medicine, warfare, banking, air travel, learning, prostitution, journalism, mail order and romance. For some reason, photographers were among the last to climb on the train, on the pretext that they found poetry in celluloid film, in the darkness of the lab and in the smell of thiosulphate. I can only say that I never shared that taste. As for computers, I began getting interested in them at the end of the ’70s, when an American friend mentioned a new machine that could do something called word processing, which allowed to make corrections of a text after it had been typed. A couple of years later, my son David, who was 15 at the time, told me that he was taking a course in computer programming, and I felt like the father of a future Einstein. In order not to be left behind, I purchased an Apple II, the ancestor of the Macintosh, which had 48 KB of RAM, no hard disk, and of course nothing like a mouse. But one thing it could do was word processing, and the files could be saved onto floppy disks, each of which held the content of about a hundred pages. Then a fellow photographer, who was working for Stern, told me that in Hamburg they had a computer that could retouch photographs. So I began to regret all the photos of trees that I had thrown away because of some power lines that showed in the background and that I hadn’t noticed while shooting. And to dream of fashion sittings on which I wouldn’t have to hang around for hours, waiting for the make-up artist to apply layers of foundation, so as to hide some red spot on the model’s chin.