Born in Italy in 1928 into a Jewish family of doctors of central European origin, Frank Horvat (FR-IT, 1928-2020) lived by turns in Switzerland, Italy, Pakistan, India, England and France, where he settled in the late 1950s, while regularly visiting the United States and travelling often in Europe, North and South America and Asia. He took his first photographs in Italy with a humanist angle and was definitively marked by Henri Cartier-Bresson whom he met in Paris and who convinced him to use a Leica and to head for India. In the 1950s and 60s – and even afterwards as well – being a 'fashion' photographer necessarily meant working in a studio, respecting the numerous codes that helped to 'show off' clothing, by repeating poses and framing certain details, among other things. Frank Horvat, who loved capturing the animated streets of Paris, shaping them, summarizing them in an instant, was the first photographer to bring models out onto the street, to fit them back into the flow of life. While revolutionizing approaches to fashion, Horvat nevertheless remained faithful to his endlessly benevolent curiosity for the essentially human and to a way of practicing photography with presence and elegance in free and ultimately joyful snapshots.

Vast, but also little known in France, the photographic works of the artistic pioneer from Luxembourg, Romain Urhausen (LU, 1930-2021) are marked by his singular style, a mixture of the French humanist school and the German subjective school of the 1950s and 60s, to which he actively contributed. Often a pretext for formal and poetic exploration, his photographic subjects, tinged with humor, go beyond a classical representation of reality. He brings an experimental, artistic approach to bear on daily life, a man at work, an urban landscape, a nude or a self-portrait. The subjective aesthetic he learned from Otto Steinert marked his formal language, his way of treating contrasts and composition, but also his way of looking differently at the world. In 2022, the Rencontres d’Arles dedicated a retrospective to him called, In His Time; the catalogue was published by Delpire & Co.

Born in 1925 in Tours, Roger Catherineau (FR, 1925-1962) studied drawing and painting at the École du Louvre and the École des Arts de Paris before initiating his photographic practice. Disappointed by laboratories, he would proceed and print his photographs himself. He soon developed an abstract expressionist style. Since 1948, Roger Catherineau's photographic work has been built as a quest for experimentation. Rejecting any notion of depiction of reality, he elaborates unreferenced, troubled, and most often abstract images. Developing the notion of "productive transformation", he wishes to compose from scratch the image he has of an object, and not to reproduce it. In 1955 he was invited to participate in the major exhibition Subjektive Fotografie 2 in Saarbrücken. His work was also exhibited in France, Belgium and Germany and published in numerous international magazines and compilations. His photographs are in the collections of the French Musée National d'Art Moderne, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Folkwang Museum in Essen (Otto Steinert collection).