Ida Kar Photographer

by Val Williams, London 1989



CHAPTER ONE

Becoming Idabel - From Armernia to Alexandria 1908-1945

'We travelled as a matter or course. I rejoice that I went when the going was good.'

Ida Karamian was born in Tambov in the USSR in 1908. Her early years were spent in Russia, in Iran and, from the age of thirteen, in Egypt. The Karamians settled in Alexandria, where Ida's father Melkon pursued his teaching career, and Ida continued her education at the Lycee Francais in Alexandria. Melkon Karamian was determined that his only daughter should have a career, and in 1928, encouraged her to travel to Paris, to take up studies in medicine and chemistry. What kind of a physician Ida Kar would have been remains a matter of conjecture, for she had soon abandoned her studies in favour of an intense course of lessons in singing and the violin, and was living and working among the young avant garde of the Left Bank.

Ida's music studies led to an important friendship. She became acquainted with Suzanne Dumesnil, a progressive woman and skilled musician, later to become the companion and wife of Samuel Beckett. At Dumesnil's home in the thirteenth arrondissement, Ida met a young German surrealist painter and photographer, Heinrich Heidersberger. To Heidersberger, the twenty-two year old Ida was a striking figure, dark-haired and dark-eyed - exotic. She stemed to him to be 'a young girl, almost a teenager' and their friendship grew and prospered as the 1920s drew to a close.

Ida had arrived in Paris when the city was at its most excitingly international, and when its position as centre of the arts was unrivalled. Some six years before Ida's arrival from Alexandria, the young American Sylvia Beach had published (in 1922) the first edition of James Joyce's Ulyssees, and by the late twenties, the best of European and American writing and painting was available to all through the medium of adventurous small magazines.

Eugene Jolas's periodical, Transition was only one way in which new Paris residents might see the work of artists like Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst. Huge innovations were taking place throughout the arts. Audiences had given an enthusiastic reception to Luis Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalous, and both Ida and Heinrich Heidersberger had been present for its first showing at the house of the Surrealist group in Studio 20 at the rue du Chateau.

It was in Paris in the late twenties that Ida first became aware of the potential of photography. After their initial meeting, a friendship of strength and intensity grew between Ida and Heinrich Heidersberger, and eventually, they became lovers, sharing an apartment on the rue Perrier in Montrouge. Heidersberger had 'begun to make reproductions with a wooden camera bought at the fleamarket', and, with Ida looking on, he 'exposed the plates to the moonlight which entered through the glass roof', and then made contact prints. Ida herself recalled, many years later, that she first became intrigued by photography when she acted as a model for Heidersberger during these first experiments. Together, they visited photo exhibitions, and could not have failed to be aware of the new modernism in photography emanating from Germany, and enthusiastically received in Paris. Seminal German books like Karl Blossfeldt's Urformen der Kunst (1928) and Werner Graff's Es Kommt der Neue Fotograf (1929) were readily available to Parisian enthusiasts.

By the time that Ida had arrived in the city, Andre Kertesz had already held his first one-man show at the Sacre du Printemps Gallery (in 1927), and Berenice Abbott had shown her influential Portraits Photographiques. In 1926, the future photodocumentarist Walker Evans arrived in Paris from the United States for a year's study at the Sorbonne, and at Vogue magazine, Lucien Vogel was influencing a whole generation of young photographers. At the very centre of photographic activity was Man Ray, the pioneering experimentalist who had made his first Rayogram in Paris in 1922, and who numbered among his students in the twenties Berenice Abbott and the British photographer Bill Brandt. Also in Paris from the mid-1920s were Paul Outerbridge, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, and, from 1929, the documentarist Brassai, whose seminal study of Parisian street life, Paris by Night was published in 1933.

Undoubtedly Ida's interest in photography was stimulated in these early years in France. Frequent visits to art galleries, bookshops and the cinema gave her important insights into European cultural initiatives. She attended a showing of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (projected in an attic) and Heinrich Heidersberger remembers the thrill of the occasion: 'The screen was moving in the draught, so that the red coloured flag appeared to move on the screen in a special rhythm when it was projected in the final shot. It was as though we were part of a conspiracy in that room.'

Even in those early years, Ida was fascinated and intrigued by the lives of writers and artists, and through Heidersberger, she met many important innovators, and, for the first time, encountered the orderly jumble of the artist's studio, laying the foundations for a fascination with the patterning and surfaces of painting and sculpture workshops which was to direct and inform much of her later work in photography. A particular friendship developed with the Dutch artist Gerard Hordyk, and his American wife Margaret and Piet Mondrian and Yves Tanguy were members of the group of people with whom Ida and Heidersberger mixed. A favourite diversion for Ida was to visit the small dance bars usod by artists, and with Heidersberger she attended some of the large artists' parties which were a feature of Parisian life at the end of the twenties.

The Paris years also saw Ida's growing interest in politics: 'she was a totally committed revolutionary, politically left wing just as everyone in artistic circles was at the time of the surrealists.' Ida's political convictions stayed with her for the remainder of her life, and during the 1960s, she became a loyal supporter of the Cuban revolution. (Sometimes, in later life, she would jot down thonghts on politics in her notebooks, and in the mid-1960s, offered to contribute photographs free of charge to Labour's Trilune newspaper.)

By the end of 1933, Ida had returned to Alexandria, taking with her a keepsake from Heidersberger: 'a small work which I entitled "Charlie Chaplin", and which was a kind of "assemblage" made up of all sorts of material and a montage of these.' During her four years in France, she had acquired a sophisticated knowledge of European art, film-making and literature. Alexandria, in contrast to Paris, had little to offer her. She rejected the bourgeois life of her family and friends, but at the same time was unable to decide which direction her life should take. Acute problems with her voice prevented her from continuing with her singing career, and an unhappy love affair made her despair of ever regaining the happiness which she had found in Paris. After the freedoms of France, she found the moral strictures of middle-class Armenian society irksome. From her parents' home in the rue Tanis she wrote in 1934:

...this existence has completely defeated me. My voice has been in need of special care, but I haven't had enough heart to look after myself. I've experienced a profound disgust for life. If I stay in this accursed country, I'll probably never love again . .. My life is very sad, and I'm spending the best years of my life like an old maid.

Ida's liking for children led her to consider undertaking a course of training as a nursery nurse, and she considered the possibility of enrolling as a student at a kindergarten in Paris. It was, however, her unexpected involvement with photography which was to direct the course of future events, from the mid-1930s onwards. In later life, Ida was asked to recall the beginning of her interest in photography for the benefit of the critics who flocked to her Whitechapel exhibition in 1960. Although her own story of her early career was possibly a dramatised one, there was probably much truth in her acconnt:

She became a photographer as the direct result of losing her voice while studying singing in Paris. On her return to her native city, still undecided about the future, she happened, while walking throngh town, to stop in front of a photographic studio. The owner, who was at the moment standing in the doorway, asked her without more ado to become his assistant/receptionist, and Ida Kar impulsively agreed, on condition that she would be allowed to use the studio facilities during her free time.

Like many other illustrious photographers of the twenties and thirties, Ida learned her craft by practising on her friends and relations. Soon, she began to meet others who were involved in the medium. One fellow enthusiast was Edmond Belali, an Egyptian goverament official and serious amateur photographer who became Ida's first husband. Married in the late thirties, the two photographers moved to Cairo, where they established a small studio, called after their joint names - Idabel.

According to Ida's own accounts, the studio was uncompromisingly artistic, rebusing to take 'conventional pictures, static wedding groups or frozen passports'." The premises were decorated in modern style, and Ida would place a single long-stemmed flower in an elegant vase in the shop-window to deter the casual passer-by. Problems arose inevitably when 'Ida's ideas of what a good portrait should be differed so often from those of her clients that business was nonexistent, and she had to take a variety of part-time jobs in order to keep going." Sadly, no photographs from Ida's pre-war years can now be traced, but those of her friends who have vague memories of her Egyptian work recall large moody close-ups and surrealistic still lifes.

Uncompromising or not, Idabel's sternly artistic approach to portraiture appears to have paid off. When the yonng Victor Musgrave, stationed in war-time Cairo and contributing pieces of art criticism to the Egyptian Gazette, encountered Ida Kar in the early forties, the studio was operating from a fashionable quarter of Cairo, and was much liked among the cosmopolitan set of writers and artists who congregated in the city during the war years. So well thought of was the work of Idabel that Ida and Belali were accepted as exhibitors in the two surrealist exhibitions staged in Cairo in 1943 and 1944 and the business prospered.

The arrival of Victor Musgrave, a young, talented and exceptionally charming Englishman, into Ida's life sigualled the beginning of a relationship which was to endure, in pleasure and in pain, for the next two decades. During the war years, Ida divorced Edmond Belali, and in her thirty-sixth year, she and Victor were married, and living in 'their amazing home in the Darb el Labana [which] became the resort of artists and writers visiting Cairo from all over the world'. From cosmopolitan Cairo, they were soon to set off on another adventure, to explore and to inhabit an entirely new bohemia.