The Frank Horvat photo exhibit at Rome’s magnificent Baths of Caracalla, September 11th, 2026

The Frank Horvat photo exhibit is currently on until January, 2027 at Rome’s magnificent Baths of Caracalla (named after the Emperor Caracalla who had granted citizenship to all those living under the Roman Empire).

Horvat was born in Abbazia, Italy in 1928  into a Jewish family from Central Europe and died 2020.  He was an Italian photographer who lived and worked in France. He’s best known for his fashion photography, published between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s. Horvat's photographic opus includes photojournalism, portraiture, landscape, nature, and sculpture.  He collaborated with fellow photographers such as Don McCullin, Robert Doisneau and Helmut Newton.  In the 1990s he was one of the first major photographers to experiment with technology including Photoshop.

Horvat started his career in the mid 1950s as a otojournalist in Paris, working to capture the “sleaze and squalor” of the city before going on to fashion photography.  In 1955 he moved from London to Paris and found that the mood of its streets and its inhabitants had little in common with the somewhat romantic vision of the so-called humanist photographers.  In 1957, Horvat shot fashion photographs for Jardin des Modes using a 35-mm camera and available light,  which formerly had rarely been used for fashion. This innovation was welcomed by ready-to-wear designers because it presented their creations in the context of everyday life. 

In the 1990s, Horvat became interested in computer technology and produced Yao the Cat (1993), Bestiary (1994), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1995). He transgressed the Cartier-Bressonian rule of the "decisive moment" by combining parts of images shot at different times and in different places.  Several years later he produced A Trip to Carrara.  

Women played a central thematic role in his fashion journalistic works and with a focus on realism. Speaking about women in his photography and his emphasis on natural looks he said, “I was interested in women. I wanted to show what I liked about them. They would spend two hours in the makeup chair, and I’d try to get them to remove it so they’d look more natural".  

Horvat died on 21 October 2020 at the age of 92.