2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
In October 1996, the city of Angoulême commissioned me to produce a series of illustrations for the catalogue of their Piano Festival and the decoration of their auditorium. I wandered through its streets for a couple of hours, without finding anything that I would have associated with a piano concert by Bach or Mozart. But I was intrigued by a row of small sculptured figures, right under the gutters of an octagonal twelfth century church, that had incongruously been left intact amongst the sheds and warehouses of a suburb called La Couronne. Except that they were placed so high up, that in order to get a reasonably good shot I had to use a telephoto lens, with a heavy tripod to avoid camera vibrations. The first object to which I pointed it was an oval shape, which when magnified on my ground glass turned out to represent the face of a young woman, and which had something at once expressive and elemental, reminding me of certain female portraits by Matisse or Picasso. But I wouldn’t have made the association without the tele-lens… To me, this was one of those thrilling instances when photography allows one to understand something that the naked eye is unable to make out.
1996-1997, Saint Michel, Charente, Angoumois, France, modillon (e)