My name is Horatio Franco, though most people call me H. I am a portrait photographer based between Philadelphia and Florida's Gulf Coast.
For more than twenty-five years, I have photographed people throughout the United States and around the world. My work has been published internationally and has received recognition through national and international photography awards.
I have photographed joy and grief. Confidence and vulnerability. Celebration and loss. Intensity and stillness. What continues to fascinate me is not how people look.
It is who they are.
I believe a portrait should be more than a record. It should reveal something. A portrait should contain traces of a conversation, a moment of trust, a shared silence, a memory, or a discovery.
When I photograph someone for a personal portrait project, I am not interested in immediately placing them in front of a camera. I prefer to talk first. Sometimes that means coffee. Sometimes it means a long conversation. Sometimes it simply means sitting quietly and learning who someone is.
There is a process of discovery that happens before the camera is ever raised. That process matters, because a photograph is what happens on both sides of the camera.