Before Horvath attacks his toy soldiers, he follows his feelings to capture his images, without (what would be for him) the limitation of producing sketches or storyboards. "It's more of a flow-of-consciousness process, rather than logic-of-thought," as he puts it. Then Horvath heats a needle over a candle flame and stabs it into the mouth of a half-inch-tall soldier at a scale of one to 72, spewing soot and melted plastic. Still, without using a magnifying glass, he plunges a hot nail through the back of a head, exploding the eyes to form a skull. Melting arms and legs wrench and writhe as he bends, twists and stretches them over the flame.
His tortured figures struggle and surrender before backgrounds of cotton-ball fiber, llama wool, toothbrushes, toothpaste, glue, salt and flour, among model houses and other toy props. With a desk lamp, candlelight, flashlight or sunlight (rarely flash) to illuminate his mostly desert-landscape battlefields, Horvath presses the 21mm wide-angle lens (accompanied by macros) of his camera smack against his subjects. "They're actually touching the lens, they're that close. So the point of focus is really the front of the glass of the lens," he says.
Sometimes, Horvath uses mirrors or his lens as reflectors, and dusts the latter with flour to blur the light. Then, after days or even weeks to set up the scene, he shoots, with 35mm film. "It only comes together if it looks right in the camera," he says. "As soon as I take the picture, the photo is basically finished." And Horvath's hand in the process from then on is kept at a minimum.
He develops the film and scans the unaltered negatives himself. But, because of the photos' large size, he has a professional studio print out, from the digital files, the positive image onto photographic paper. Horvath then takes that into the darkroom. Because this end of the process doesn't appeal to him that much, he works in there just long enough to produce the image, with no manipulation.
He remembers the first time he shot one of the little guys, as part of a class assignment to photograph different materials. It was 1991, while at a photography school in Vienna. After that two-year program, Horvath pursued his years-long interest in filmmaking, at a multimedia art school in Salzburg, where he also taught photography.
His father, an architect, first introduced him to the art form, Sundays going through photography books with the ten-year-old Horvath who was snapping color slides by age 12. Six years later, he met American photographer Ernestine Ruben, who invited him into the world of black-and-white. Through assistantships and workshops with her then, "she taught me to trust and follow my own ideas, in order to complete a body of work," he says.
Over the years, Horvath has completed many, including his "Cowboys and Indians" series (inspired by his interest in rural America, originating from his Iowa-high-school-exchange-student days) and his soon-to-be-published book of East Siberia photos. Concurrently with "Los Desastres de la Guerra," Horvath is working on another series called "Compositions," abstract, color images of autumn leaves. He is also putting together a collection of his photos of Poland, eventually another book.
Moving back and forth between photography and film, last fall Horvath spent a couple of months in Lodz, Poland editing his independent documentary film on foot-and-mouth disease in England. His documentary on reindeer herding in Scandinavia joins several of his experimental films, screened at film festivals throughout Europe.
Horvath's work has won him various grants, and his photos have been published in European magazines, newspapers and books. A couple times a year, they also appear in solo and group exhibitions in Europe. Some exhibits of his series on war include interpretive text, some don't. But does it really matter whether or not you know what you're looking at? With their archetypally emotional content and spontaneously kinetic form, Horvath's "Los Desastres de la Guerra" at once perturbs and allures, repelling you and drawing you in at the same time. Somehow, that's enough.