In the photographer Frank Horvat moved to Paris. Born in Abbazia, which was then part of Italy but is now Croatia, at the age of fifteen had swapped a stamp collection for a 35mm camera and started his career as a photographer. Horvat, unsurprisingly, was refused entry to everywhere he tried. At about two in the morning, however, he came across Le Sphinx. It was a run-down little strip club named after the fabled Parisian brothel where the photographer Brassai and Man Ray had photographed in the s, Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart had been visitors and where Marlene Dietrich used for assignations with one of her lovers, the French actress Madeleine Solonge.
After giving the doorman of the rather run-down Le Sphinx a rather large tip of francs Horvat was allowed in. Horvat had been fast, however, and already had already taken five rolls of film. In an interview with the Guardian in Horvat talked about the most well-known of the pictures taken that night and once used in Vogue magazine as a double-paged spread:.
The terrible painting behind adds to the atmosphere β it was so of its time. As the stripper walked past under the lights, her naked body was very over-exposed: she looks like a marble sculpture. A lot of things came together in this shot. I could never take it again, even if someone paid me a million pounds to try. Photographs used with kind permission of Frank Horvat. Please consider making a donation to our site.
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Frank Horvat , Paris, Le Sphinx. Frank Horvat , Paris, Place Pigalle, bar scene. Frank Horvat , Paris, tourists in a night club.
