{"id":13472,"date":"2011-04-27T08:00:24","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=13472"},"modified":"2011-11-03T12:58:42","modified_gmt":"2011-11-03T16:58:42","slug":"ida-kar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/27\/ida-kar\/","title":{"rendered":"Ida Kar"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ida Kar, self-portrait with a painting by John Christoforou and an assemblage by Heinrich Heidersberger, 1962.<\/p><\/div>\n

After moving from Tambov, Russia, to Egypt with her Armenian parents in 1921, Ida Kar spent five years in Paris. She had been educated at the prestigious Lyc\u00e9e Fran\u00e7ais in Alexandra, but her stint on the Left Bank, at age twenty, formed the foundation of her education as an artist. Andr\u00e9 Breton had written the first Surrealist manifesto there four years earlier, and the city was a hotbed of artistic experimentation. In the studio of a young German photographer named Heinrich Heidersberger, Kar made her first foray into photography. She returned to Egypt in 1933, just as that nation\u2019s artists began developing their own iteration of surrealism (Andr\u00e9 Breton famously wrote to poet Georges Henelin, in 1936, \u201cThe imp of the perverse, as he deigns to appear to me, seems to have one wing here, the other in Egypt\u201d), and dedicated herself to the medium.<\/p>\n

When the newly married Kar moved to London in 1945, she wasted little time in initiating her photographic career and cultivating the kind of artistic community she had known in Cairo. She began making high-contrast, tightly cropped commercial portraits of theater actors in 1947; by the end of fifties, her roster of sitters had come to include many of the era\u2019s most significant painters, sculptors, authors, poets, playwrights, and composers, among them T. S. Eliot, No\u00ebl Coward, L. S. Lowry, and Somerset Maugham in London; Le Corbusier, Man Ray, Marie Laurencin, and Alberto Giacometti in Paris; and Dmitry Shostakovich, Leonid Leonov, Ernst Neizvestny, and Ilya Ehrenberg in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

In 1960, Kar mounted a groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; hers was the first retrospective show of a photographer at a London gallery. Of it, she boasted, \u201cWe are going to make this show the most exciting photographic event since \u2018The Family of Man.\u2019\u201d The comparison with Edward Steichen\u2019s thorough 1955 survey of documentary photography at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art was apt. The Whitechapel show solidified Kar\u2019s reputation as documentarian of cultural life, while rousing critics to debate photography\u2019s aspirations to the level of high art. \u201cI don\u2019t think it is an art,\u201d insisted David Sylvester, a fan of Kar\u2019s work, \u201cbecause the essence of art is that the artist creates his forms and does not select them: photography reproduces the form.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kar proved unmoved by the debate. Until her death in 1974, she continued her work, making sensitive portraits of the St. Ives artistic community, of Fidel Castro and Cuban writers, and of any number of intrepid, purposeful women artists.<\/p>\n

Click on the images below to open a gallery of Kar\u2019s photography.<\/p>\n

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