Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 26 Mar 2018

Ida Kar, Bohemian Photographer with essays by Clare Freestone and Karen Wright

Ida Kar (1908 – 1974) has come to be acknowledged as one of the true pioneers of photography as an art form and her black and white portraits of painters, poets and writers from what is often known as the Bohemian art world are legendary.

Born in Armenia, Kar was originally Ida Karamian and as a child she lived in Iran and Egypt before going to Paris to study medicine. But she soon fell under the spell of the avant-garde art scene and began studying singing and became interested in left-wing politics and the early days of photography as a surrealist art-form.

She married and returned to Alexandria where she and her husband set up a photographic studio and remained involved with Surrealism – resulting in two dedicated exhibitions, the last one in Cairo in 1944. But her marriage didn’t last and she met her second husband, a British poet and art dealer, Victor Musgrave, and they moved to London in 1945.

Once in London, Kar re-established links with the British Surrealist movement and used those contacts to start building a portfolio of portraits that would make her name. Her first exhibition, 40 Artists From Paris and London, wasn’t a big success but she took on John Kasmin as her agent and he began getting commissions and selling her photographs to the press.

After travelling back to Armenia again in 1957 and then going n to the Soviet Union to photograph artists and writers of the East European avant-garde, Kar’s big breakthrough came in 1960 when the Whitechapel Gallery held an exhibition of her photographs – the first ever of its kind in this country. By the late 1960s she was working as part of a photographic group or agency which dissolved in 1969 but she continued working until her death five years later.

This publication by the National Portrait Gallery was published in 2011 to coincide with a major retrospective of Kar’s work – the NPG having purchased her complete photographic archive in 1999. It includes two excellent short essays; the first by Clare Freestone that tells the story of Ida Kar and her journey to becoming such a significant figure in the world of photography and the second by Karen Wright that assesses her art as a portrait photographer.

The plates are beautiful and the overall quality of the book is what we’ve come to expect from The National Portrait Gallery publications. The real measure of top class photographic portraiture is whether the person behind the lens can find a different way of seeing people we’ve seen many times in snaps and other press photographs. Kar most certainly has the ability to do that and she also has the admirable knack of making less more when it comes to composition and background.

Sean O’Hagan who reviewed this book for The Guardian in 2011 at the time of publication also noted her flare for composition:

The first thing that strikes you about Kar's portraits of British and European artists is her compositional brilliance. The studio or workplace, often cluttered with tools and works-in-progress, is nearly always the backdrop. She places a stern-looking Henry Moore at the end of a row of moulded torsos, the biggest of which is shrouded in shadow so it resembles a sphinx. Both Georges Braque and Jean Arp are surrounded by studio clutter, but both exude a calmness that is both relaxed and oddly formal – Arp is even wearing a hat and white gloves. They are not just at one with their working environment, she seems to be saying, they are their work.

O’Hagan also provides a fitting summary:

All human life is here, caught by a photographer who excelled at following her instincts and then applying her singular formal skill to order them into art.

The good news is that you can still get copies of this book on the second hand market for under £20, which I consider to be a major bargain.

 

Terry Potter

March 2018