Ida Kar: Photographer, 1908-1974

When Ida Kar came to London in 1945, she left behind her in Cairo a reputation as a stylish avant-garde photographer. With ebullience and determination, she found in London a new Bohemia and spent the next 15 years portraying it. She photographed tirelessly, almost every new and important writer and artist from Doris Lessing to T.S.Eliot, David Hockney to Margot Fonteyn. Her documentary studies of London street life and her explorations of her homeland Armenia and Castro's Cuba exploded on the British cultural scene at a time when phtotography was excluded from the domain of high art. This study deals with Ida Kar's life and work in both biographical and aesthetic terms, making extensive use of correspondence and interviews from her recent but strangely obscure past and brings together her most haunting and evocative pictures - a statement and testimony of her life and times. Val Williams is the author of "Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present".