About myself: I was born in Italy
69 years ago, and I have been a photographer since the age of twenty. I
have lived in a various countries and tried several kinds of photography,
from photo-journalism to fashion, portrait and landscape. During the last
six years, I've experimented with a computer.
About this project: the images shown
here are part of a body of about two hundred. Sixty-four of these have been
exhibited at the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris, France, in December
1994, and published as a book by Actes Sud, Arles, France. It took me about
two years to complete the work.
The idea behind these images: our
main sight organ is not the eye but the brain. That's why a camera, which
is a physical imitation of the eye, shows only a fraction of what we see
(and much that we don't see). The computer, which is a physical imitation
of the brain, could create a much better equivalent of our perceptions.
For instance: when Grégoire,
my 8-year old grandson, got back the pictures he took at the zoo, he was
disappointed to see all those iron bars and all that concrete surrounding
the animals: what his mind perceived and retained may be much closer to
what is shown in this Bestiary.
In other words: it's the camera that
has taught us to see photographically. Other humans, of other civilizations,
have seen more with the eyes of their mind (think of medieval painting or
of aztec sculpture!). Computer images will probably teach us a different
way of seing (though I would hate to see the world the way it's seen by
some computer artists...)
About technique: all the photographs
used in these compositions were taken by myself, with a Nikon camera and
reversible color film. I used a Nikon scanner, a Macintosh computer, a Kodak
XL thermal printer. The program was Adobe Photoshop 2. The animals were
photographed in various zoos, the landscapes are from my files.
Frank Horvat
Frank Horvat can be reached at:
frank.horvat@wanadoo.fr |