Before becoming one of the most influential fashion photographers of his generation, Frank Horvat (1928-2020) embarked on a journey that would shape his vision for years to come. In 1952, at the age of twenty-five, he travelled to India and Pakistan, following his first encounter with Indian soldiers in Switzerland during the Second World War, where he had arrived as a young Hungarian Jewish refugee. Horvat spent two years travelling through India and Pakistan, photographing rituals, landscapes, and people with a curiosity and sensitivity that would become hallmarks of his later work. His photographs were soon published in Europe and the United States, and by the time he returned, he had already begun to establish an international reputation-before embarking on his pioneering career in fashion photography. Among the most celebrated images from this early period is his photograph of a bride taken in Pakistan in 1952, which Edward Steichen selected for the landmark exhibition The Family of Man at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. Horvat returned to India in 1962. Bringing together, for the first time, around one hundred black-and-white photographs from his journeys to India and Pakistan, this book offers a rare insight into the formative years of an extraordinary career.
