THE FULL STORY: Robert Vavra didn’t set out to be the best-known equine photographer in the world. But today he is, and one of his subjects, the incomparable Andalusian stallion Majestad, is almost as famous as Vavra himself. Vavra’s first literary publication were the photographs he took for James Michener’s Iberia. Bolstered by that success, Vavra studied his subjects and craft in earnest, spending more than a decade photographing Andalusians, Arabians, Lusitanos, and Camargue horses in southern Europe. Finally, he encountered Majestad. It had been more than a decade since Iberia, but Majestad helped convince Vavra that the time had come to publish his equine photographic art in a book. Vavra’s characteristic high-contrast photographs capture his favorite horses with breathtaking insight. But of Majestad, he said, “He is the only horse I ever had room for in my heart.” Majestad graced the cover of Vavra’s first horse book, Equus, The Creation of a Horse, published in 1978. The stallion is shown in three-quarter profile, standing in a field of bright-red poppies. Michener, in the forward for Equus, wrote, “These photographs are works of art. They are a joy to see, because they evoke the inner nature of the horse.” Since Equus, Vavra has published 32 books, including Such Is the Real Nature of Horses, Stallion of a Dream, Horses of the Sun, and most recently, Stallions of the Quest. He is also known for creating the photographic imagery for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer.
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