Frank Horvat, who died last month aged 92, was always alert to the offbeat in his pioneering colour photographs of the city that became a favourite subject
In the 1980s, the photographer Frank Horvat was in the habit of taking two trips a year to New York, in the height of summer and the depths of winter – “the two times when the city was at its worst”. He kept a diary of those visits and he slowly accumulated photographs. Horvat was in his early 50s and, as his diary reveals, he was struggling year on year with his eyesight; worsening double astigmatism and a partially successful operation for a detached retina. He feared “theatre curtains closing” on his life’s work.
Horvat had made his name as a fashion photographer in the 1950s and had nearly always worked in black and white, often on the street. For his New York photographs, though, he knew “colour must speak out”. “I have assimilated the laws of composition of black and white fairly well,” he told his diary. “I know how to place shapes, light, expressions, a bit like I place words in a sentence. But colour has other laws, which I am only beginning to know.” He adopted Ektachrome film that had been made famous by National Geographic and a viewfinder just bright enough “to still allow me to focus”.
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