12 Facts About Ida Kar

Ida Kar was a photographer active mainly in London after 1945.

Ida Kar took many black-and-white portraits of artists and writers.

Ida Kar's 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.

Ida Kar's parents were Armenian; her father taught mathematics and physics.

The family moved to Iran when Ida Kar was eight, and to Alexandria in Egypt when she was thirteen.

Ida Kar 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.

Ida Kar was at the first showing in 1929 of Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

Ida Kar specialized in portraiture, and in 1954 showed "Forty artists from Paris and London" at Gallery One, the gallery space her husband had opened at 1 Litchfield Street in Soho the previous year; the show had little impact.

Ida Kar arranged to learn when famous artists were to visit London; they were told that Kar had been commissioned to photograph them, and the photographs were later sold to the press.

Ida Kar visited Armenia in 1957, and the Soviet Union in 1958.

In 1968 Ida Kar advertised for an assistant in the British Journal of Photography.

Ida Kar called it KarSEC, from her name and their initials.