Ida Kar
| Ida Kar | |
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Ida Kar a few months before her death, photographed by Mark Gerson
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| Born |
Ida Karamian or Karamanian 8 April 1908 Tambov, Russian Empire |
| Died | 24 December 1974 Bayswater, London, England |
| Known for | photography, particularly portraits |
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Ida Kar (8 April 1908 – 24 December 1974) was a photographer active mainly in London after 1945. She took many black-and-white portraits of artists and writers. Her solo show of photographs at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960 was the first of its kind to be held in a major public gallery in London. Kar made a significant contribution to the recognition of photography as a form of fine art.
Kar was born Ida Karamian or Karamanian at Tambov in Russia on 8 April 1908. Her parents were Armenian; her father taught mathematics and physics. The family moved to Iran when Kar was eight, and to Alexandria in Egypt when she was thirteen. She studied at the Lycée Français there. When she was twenty she went to Paris to study chemistry and medicine, but soon began to study singing instead. She frequented the avant-garde artists and writers of the Parisian Rive Gauche, among them Piet Mondrian and Yves Tanguy, and became interested in socialist politics, in photography and in Surrealism. She was at the first showing in 1929 of Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Her first work as a photographer was in the studio of the Surrealist photographer and painter Heinrich Heidersberger.
In 1933 Kar returned to Alexandria. In the late 1930s she married Edmond Belali, and together they opened a photographic studio, Idabel, in Cairo. There Kar came into contact with Egyptian Surrealists including Ikbal El Alailly and Georges Henein, and with members of the Art and Liberty movement. During the Second World War Kar and Belali participated in two Surrealist exhibitions in Cairo, the second of them in 1944. In the same year she divorced Belali and married the British poet and art dealer Victor Musgrave, who at that time was in the RAF; in 1945 they moved to London.
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