Frank Horvat Italian, 28/04/1928–21/10/2020

Photographed from below, from the foot of a stone parapet. A small girl walks along the top of it in a buttoned wool coat, white knee socks and fur-trimmed boots, with a large pale bow in her hair. Her head is down, watching where her feet go, and she is holding something tight against her chest with both hands. An ornate lamppost stands just behind her. Further along the wall a couple in hats and overcoats have stopped. They are not watching the girl. They are looking at the man with the camera.

That is the whole picture. A child is doing something requiring total concentration, on a wall, in a coat, in Paris in winter, and the only two adults in the frame have their attention somewhere else entirely. Behind them the Haussmann façades go up and up into a wet white sky, indifferent in the way buildings are.

Photographs of Paris children are usually about charm, and there is charm here if you want it, in the bow and the boots and the careful feet. What keeps the picture from settling is the couple. They turn the street into a place where several kinds of looking are going on at once, none of them lined up with any other. Horvat is looking at the girl, the couple are looking at Horvat, the girl is looking at her own boots, and the wall carries all three of them along at the same height.