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Ida Kar died alone of thrombosis and penniless in a Bayswater bedsit in 1974, surrounded by boxes of negatives worth £50,000. Her funeral was a quiet affair, in stark contrast to the publicity attracted by an exhibition of her work fourteen years earlier.

Russian-born and of Armenian parentage, Kar arrived in Britain in 1945 with her second husband, Victor Musgrave, an art dealer. He founded Gallery One and the couple became a celebrated part of London’s post-war bohemia.

During the 1950s photographic exhibitions were uncommon and photography in Britain was at its lowest ebb and entrenched in the Victorian/Edwardian genre. In challenging British photography’s conventions - along with the notion that only sculpture and painting could be considered art - Kar drew upon the avante-garde circles she inhabited while applying the training she received in Paris.

Kar produced large scale confrontational portrait works of key modernist artists and writers of the era, using a Rolliflex purchased in 1957. Compositionally challenging and in black and white, they juxtaposed artistic portraiture and reportage subject matter in non-conventional settings. These re-examined their relationship to their environment, intensifying the relationship between photographer and subject.

Although little has been written about Kar’s work as an art form, her canon is of major interest to academics of postwar English photographic art. Ever the individualist, she photographed leading icons of the 1950s and ‘60s as well as taking to the streets to photograph shopkeepers in the Royal Arcade (London) Metropolitan Music Hall, solemn characters of the demi-mode, and capture life in the Cuban capital, Havana.

Ida Kar, the development of large format editorial magazine photography such as Picture Post and the creation of new galleries as Photographers’ Gallery served to re-examine what a ‘good’ photograph could be. They also helped to expand the boundaries of portraiture and reportage, with Kar’s work in London, Cairo and Havana widely attributed to having broken down barriers to the acceptance of photography as a fine art.

Kar's landmark exhibtion at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960 marked a turning point in post-war photographic art as she was the first photographer to have a photographic exhibition at a London gallery. The result of a retrospective show of her work was to break the mould of photographic conventions and to spark a debate on whether photography could be considered art.

This exhibition presents nearly 100 works produced by Ida Kar. The Curator, Clare Freestone, sees particular interest in the letters from sitters. Correspondence from as Ivon Hitchens, for example, tell of a longstanding friendship – and a subject unafraid to pepper his correspondence with professional advice. Also noteworthy are may of Kar’s shoots in Petworth, some showing Ida with Mollie and Ivon eating relaxed on cushions and their son John, whom she subsequently spoke to and re-iterated the warmth and friendship of Kar towards the family.

Despite other successful photographers following the same theme as Douglas Glass for the Sunday Times, her vision was unique in the way she interacted with her sitters. Clare Freestone says, “She had a very sharp and instinctive
vision. Her connections (Victor Musgrave her husband, her early years spent in bustling Cairo and Paris of the surrealists) placed her amongst artists rather than fellow photographers.”

Material selected for the exhibition is from the NPG archive which features over 800 of Kar’s vintage prints, 10, 000 negatives, a sitters’ book and a portfolio book made in 1954 of her trip to the artists’ studios of Paris. This was purchased in 1999 in a sale through Christie’s on behalf of Monika Kinley, Victor Musgrave’s widow.

Featuring unseen archive material, the reappraisal provides a valuable record of the international art world as documented by Kar over three decades against a backdrop of wider plastic arts and literary subjects including Doris Lessing, T S Eliot, Man Ray, Jean Paul Satre, Eugene Ionesco and Colin MacInnes to name but a few.

Highlights of the exhibition of nearly 100 works include: An iconographic portrait of artist Yves Klein, shown at his first and highly controversial London exhibition in 1957 in front of one of his famous monochrome works, in the distinctive blue-colour he was to patent as his own. A portrait of the ‘art strike’ artist and political activist Gustav Metzger, taken at an exhibition entitled Festival of Misfits - another discovery in an exhibition which partly chronicles 1950s and 1960s Bohemian London society.  A photograph of Royston Ellis, a poet and friend of John Lennon who inspired the song Paperback Writer and introduced Lennon to ‘Polythene Pam,’ a subject of the Beatles song.  One of Kar’s earliest works, a portrait of the actress and director Sylvia Syms (1953) and a portrait of Dame Maggie Smith on the set of The Rehearsal (1961).  Images of conceptualist artists such as Gustav Metzger and John Latham.  Photographs of life in Cuba and Moscow.  A pack of Metzger negs how from a mislabelled packet of negatives we chanced upon, showing key images of Ida Karr and the first public demonstration of auto- destructive art.

Her later work includes the leading artists of the St Ives modern art movement (Tatler, 26 July 1961), featuring Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Barbara Hepworth and Terry Frost; documentary portraits of Soho bohemia; artists associated
with her husband’s Gallery One; and Kar’s contact sheet of her portrait of Fidel Castro, taken in 1964.

A story which did not make the catalogue is that of KarSEC, the collective that Kar formed in 1968. An interview with one member Les Smithers is available in Face to Face, in which he tells of Kar’s continued desire to work professionally and to re-invent herself.

However, within a decade of her fame she was forgotten. Critics claimed that, although Ida Kar expanded photographic vocabulary, she never took photographs of the same clarity or lucidity of her 1950s heyday. She was, according to her
former assistant and PR guru, John Kasmin, a "conventional bohemian". However Kar failed to achieve the success she craved, lacking an understanding of the politics of the art world and who departed it with overwhelming debts.

Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer, 1908-74

The National Portrait Gallery (London)

10 March until 19 June 2011

Copyright: Pippa Jane Wielgos

DISCLAIMER: Pippa Jane PR is a non-profit making platform producing non-commissioned independent freelance arts journalism does not represent theThe National Portrait Gallery.

Telephone: + 44 (0) 20 7487 3486. Mobile: + 44 (0) 7957 319 056

E-mail: pippa.wielgos@tiscali.co.uk

As reported in an earlier BPH blog, HistoryPin enables users share their archive photos by loading them up to a specific location on Google Maps or image on Google's modern Street View.  The site has ambitions to become the world’s largest user-generated archive of historic images and stories.

This year, not-for-profit company We Are What We Do and Reading Museum, will launch an ambitious project to tell the history of Reading through the contributions of thousands of its residents. Historypin.com, developed by We Are What We Do and Google, will provide the home for this communal history as it grows, and a special exhibition at Reading Museum will give the project a high-profile climax. Through the work, we aim to leave a legacy that can be enjoyed and added to for many generations to come.

We are looking for someone to sit at the heart of this project, working with local partners, community groups, schools, volunteers, media and people from across the town to inspire and enable broad, meaningful participation.

This Project Officer will have a keen interest in history and local historical content, as well as a passion for mass participation in the collection and sharing of history. They will be outgoing, confident and sensitive to the needs of a wide range of groups and individuals across Reading, while working well on their own and with teams at Reading Museum and We Are What We Do.

This is an exciting role for someone with a heritage, archive, museum and/or community background. The position will start in May 2011 and run for 6 months.

Please see www.historypin.com/reading for more information.

The City of Vancouver has just completed digitising a collection of 399 panoramic cityscapes from the early to mid 1900s by photographer W.J. Moore. Moore worked as a commercial photographer from 1911 to 1953. He specialized in panoramic photography of Vancouver, and covered a wide variety of subjects including street scenes, events, buildings, construction, recreational activities, harbours and docks.

Most of Moore's work were taken with a No. 8 Cirkut Outfit camera, which produced negatives 8 inches high and up to 8 feet long. It’s a demanding format, but Moore had the skill and experience necessary to produce excellent photographs.

To view this online photo archive project which has been uploaded to the Vancouver Archives website, click here.

Photo:  Stock parade at the Vancouver Exhibition at Hastings Park, 1915. Item # PAN N80. The Vancouver Exhibition was later renamed the Pacific National Exhibition. Click through the image above to see what it looked like before mini-donuts, the roller coaster, and the Prize Home.

Murray Dowding was a prolific photographer capturing hundreds of historic images of Chipping Sodbury during the early part of the 20th century. Now a new exhibition on the life and times of one of the area’s best known photographer has gone on display in Yate.

"Dowding bequeathed an immense collection of images from the earlier part of the 20th century, without which our local history would be far poorer," said Mr Hardill, community heritage officer at Yate Heritage Centre where the exhibit is being staged. 

"We will also be displaying cameras and photographic equipment from the time and provide information on the issues relating to photography over the years."

The exhibition was officially opened by local historian Jim Elsworth during a preview on Monday, and details can be found here.

Photo: View from the Moda Hotel Chipping Sodbury.

The work of the Queen of yachting photography, Eileen Ramsay, has been saved for posterity. The sailing archive, which records the explosion in dinghy and small boat sailing in Britain after the War, from early 1950s to 1970s, is filled with vintage dinghies and peaceful river sailing scenes. The archive also contains iconic pictures of offshore racing in the Solent, and historic pictures of sailing pioneers from the first Observer Single-Handed Transatlantic Races (OSTAR) and the solo voyages of Francis Chichester, Alec Rose and Eric Tabarly.

Eileen, now aged 95, has kept her photo archive intact and called in PPL Photo Agency to digitise the pictures and manage the Library. Barry Pickthall, at PPL, says: 'It was very important to save Eileen Ramsay's archive. As well as photographing dinghies and yachts for more than two decades, she was a specialist portrait photographer, and her early pictures of Francis Chichester, Eric Tabarly, Alec Rose and those OSTAR pioneers have great significance when recording Britain's sailing history.'

An exhibition of Eileen's pictures will be on display at the RYA/Volvo Dinghy Show in the West Corridor at Alexander Palace, London on the 5th and 6th March.

You can read the full news article and view some of her iconic work here.

Photo:  'Eileen Ramsay. Copyright Reserved.'

The name of this new magazine was chosen in honour of St Andrew's historic resident, Sir David Brewster, the inventor of the stereoscope. It is a student produced magazine that celebrates student photography in St Andrews while raising awareness about the photographs of the University's special collections, and its longstanding tradition with photography.

Working with the support of the University's Art History Department and Library Special Collections, the magazine is produced annually with an accompanying exhibition. Each issue explores a particular theme and features articles as well as photographs.  Like the instrument which provides its viewer with a dual-perspective, this new student magazine aims to provide views to both the past and the present.

Details of the news article can be found here, and good luck with its publication!

Located in New Delhi, the Alkazi Foundation of the Arts (AFA) building is built on 3 levels dedicated to the preservation of its vast collection of vintage photographic prints to serve the purpose of scholarship and research. Its current research topics include 'Photography and the Revolt of 1857', 'Painted Photographs', 'The Durbars of 1877, 1903, 1911' etc. It also recently held an exhibition of images taken by Sir John Marshall between 1902 and 1928. Some of the highlights of its Collection include photos by John Nicholas Tressider and Samuel Bourne.

If any of the above is of interest to your own photographic research, you can find out more of the Foundation here. 

Photo: Bourne and Shepherd, Begum of Bhopal at the 1911 Durbar, 1911 by The Alkazi Collection of Photography.

The collection of Karin and Lars Hall was started by Lars Hall during the 1970’s, when he was working as an art director and partner of a large advertising agency, Hall & Cederquist AB, in Stockholm. In 1977 he and his partners started the legendary gallery Camera obscura in Stockholm, the first photo gallery in Scandinavia to present fine art photography. The Irving Penn collection stems from Hall's warm relation to his artists. When he met Karin Hall in 1989, they decided to continue the building up of a collection that today counts approximately 400 photographs.

This new exhibition in Norway presents a unique collection of artists that have shaped the development of photography as an art form, and consists of approximately 180 works of photography, spanning from the 1842 to 2002. The legendary photographers include William Henry Fox Talbot, Edward Weston, Karl Blossfeldt, Eugène Atget, August Sander, Alfred Stieglitz, Eadweard Muybridge, André Kertész, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Édouard Boubat, Annie Leibovitz and Irving Penn, in addition to a whole range of Swedish master photographers like Hasse Persson, Patrik Andersson, Anders Kristensson and Christer Strömholm. This doesn't happen very often in Norway!

Guided tours will be conducted at 12.00 on 8 and 29 April, 13 and 27 May, 10 and 24 June and 12 August. For booking please visit www.statoil.com/hall or call  +47 51 99 45 19. 

The impressive list of vintage works on show can be found here, the official press release here, and detail of the exhibition here.

Photo: Preparing for the opening of the exhibition on 31st March 2011 (Copyright: Statoil)

A treasure trove of more than 3,000 World War I glass plate negatives of  British, Indian, French, Australians, and Americans, and even some of the Chinese Labour Corps and other allied troops have been found, sitting almost undisturbed for nearly a century, in three large chests in a dusty attic of a dilapidated farmhouse in Vignacourt in the Somme valley, some two hours north of Paris. Named after the photographers, local farmer Louis Thuillier and his wife Antoinette, "The Thuillier Collection" was almost lost to history because the farmhouse where they were stored is likely to be sold in coming months and their descendants had no idea of the historical significance of the plates.

Throughout much of the war they photographed the fighting men who came to their humble outdoor studio in the courtyard of their house. Thousands of their photographs must have found their way to homes around the world, including Australia. Remarkably the Thuilliers’ glass plate negatives still exist, sitting almost undisturbed for nearly a century.  They have recently been located by investigators from Australia’s Channel 7.  The TV program has secured almost 500 of the plates from a Thuillier family relative, Henriette Crognier. When she heard of the great interest in the plates, she insisted on donating them to Australia.

Research at the Australian War Memorial indicates that the Australian photographs were mostly taken in November 1916 and during November-December 1918.  Among the latter are scenes of celebration on the day the war ended, 11 November 1918.  As Australian War Memorial head of military history, Ashley Ekins, said the ‘Thuillier Collection’ is an extremely valuable collection of images of Australian and other allied soldiers just behind the frontlines, one of the “most important discoveries from the First World War”.

You can catch a preview of the programme "The Lost Diggers" and a gallery of the photos here, as well as an article from the Australian War Memorial here.

Photo:  On leave ... a message to the folks at home (Copyright: The Thuillier Collection)

In 1886, some forty-seven years after Daguerre and Talbot announced their respective photographic processes, a group of enthusiasts met to form a Photographic Society with the aim of improving photography amongst it’s members. The Society was called The Warrington Amateur Photographic Society and it’s first President was Mr J T Down, Secretary and Managing Director of the Wilderspool Brewery.

To celebrate it's 125th year, the Warrington Photographic Society will be holding a special photo exhibition from 4 March-11 April 2011, details which can be found here. 

The Society is stil going strong and has its own website here: http://www.warringtonps.co.uk/

The Warrington Photographic Society has in its possession 652 glass 6x6cm (3.25 x 3.25 inch) lantern slides, which were the product of 21 workers, dating from 1891 to the early 1960s. There are some large gaps in dates, notably during the two World Wars also during the 1920s, but this collection is a fascinating historical record.

Although most workers were male, the few female members were extremely successful but sadly only a very few of their slides remain. There are a considerable number of slides which do not have titles or locations and unfortunately there are some with unknown authors. Some slides form part of lectures, but sadly no lecture notes survive.

Some of the slides are coloured. Early ones being hand tinted, some by the Paget process – a process using coloured rice crystals in the photographic gelatine. Society records show that a lecture on the Paget process took place in the Old Academy on 21st January 1919.

Owing to the fragile nature of the slides and the projection equipment required the Society only used to project a few slides once a year. However modern technology now allows the Society to view these slides easily thanks to a Lottery Grant.

Lottery Awards

The Society was awarded a Lottery award of £3350 in February 2006 for the purchase of a laptop, digital projector and to have the entire lantern slide collection professionally scanned and digitally cleaned. This was undertaken by a company call The Dot Foundry and they provided an excellent service.

The Society now has an archive quality scan of each image and a smaller file for use in projecting and display. This has made the collection alot more accessible and a touring lecture is now available.

Lecture

A lecture entitled Warrington PS Lantern Slide Collection is now available for booking. The lecture provides an overview of some of the best images in the collection and also some of the original slides can be displayed. The lecture is given by Martin Berry LRPS and can be tailored to suit an organisations or time requirements.
Lantern Slide Gallery

A small selection of the lantern slide images are available for viewing on this website.

Altogether, two albums containing 102 mounted albumen prints, c. 1887-1897 and bought by a private dealer at a house clearance many years ago, have been submitted for auction with a pre-sale estimate of £10,000. Other subjects in the albums include photos of native women from Hawaii and Fiji, some of Hawaiin Royalty including King Kalakaua - who died in 1891 - Queen Liliuokalani and Princess Kaiulani.

You can view Lot 865 from the catalogue here.

Photo:  The photograph of the lone surfer would appear to be one of the earliest known photographs of the subject. 
The Bishop Museum in Honolulu holds 24.7 million items relating to Hawaii and the Pacific. Last autumn it held an exhibition about surfing and included their copy of the same image of the lone surfer as a highlight of the exhibition.

Just in case some BPH members are unaware, the Perth Museum & Art Gallery’s photographic collections contain examples of many photographic processes from the earliest daguerreotypes and calotypes, right through to the digital photography of today. 
One of the earliest photographs of Perth and Perthshire can be found within the Museum's collection of about 2,500 glass plate negatives belonging to Magnus Jackson (1831-1891). He built his first photographic studio on Marshall Place, Perth in the late 1850s where St Leonard's in the Fields Church now stands.

Another collection is the Wood & Son Printers in Perth who produced a series of postcard views of Perthshire from photographs taken by several local photographers between 1903 and 1923. Perth Museum & Art Gallery cares for the 1000+ negatives which have all been digitised and may be searched using their showcase public access terminal in the entrance hall of the Museum. The Museum is also currently in the process of documenting, storing and digitising approximately 15,000 images, taken between 1927 and 1993, from the business of D Wilson Laing Photographers, Blairgowrie.

Hopefully all these collections will be available online soon for easy access by photohistorians. In the meantime, you can read more about Magnus Jackson here, and the Museum's impressive collection here.

Photo:  The ‘accused’ stands before the magistrate, in Perth Sherriff Court, Tay Street taken in the 1880s. Copyright Magnus Jackson Gallery.

The Bournemouth Echo reported that photographer George Courtney Ward has died. Courtney Ward who died at his home in Westbourne on Tuesday, February 15, aged 93, photographed some of the most famous names in cinema during his 30 years working at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire. Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, Alec Guinness and Kenneth More were just some of the screen stars in George’s portfolio. Examples of his portraits are in the National Portrait Gallery Collection (http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?firstRun=true&sText=Courtney+Ward&search=sa&LinkID=mp16878&role=art)

He was understood to be a good friend of Lord Attenborough and worked on some of the best-loved British films, including The Ipcress File,  Oliver Twist in 1948, This Sporting Life in 1963 and Great Expectations in 1946, and also designed the artwork for Brief Encounter.

George was born in Christchurch in 1917 and grew up in the town before becoming a stills photographer at Pinewood. At first he commuted, but shortly moved to Fulmer in Buckinghamshire with his mother and aunt. After more than 30 years working at Pinewood, George moved to Elstree studios in 1969 when the photographic department was closed down. But when that studio was taken over in 1972, he decided to sell his house, retire and move back down to Bournemouth. 

George had no close family, but his dearest friend, John Smith, remembers him as his “second father”. The pair met while they were both working in the photographic department at Elstree. “He was a very independent man and he had a great love of music,” remembers John, who would visit George regularly and phone him almost every day.  “He had a wonderful knowledge of music, going back to the 1930 and 1940s, and musical films, he had a great love of that as well. One of his idols was Dick Powell.”  John, who lives in Hertfordshire with his wife Beryl, added: “He was a wonderful listener with a great sense of humour.

Gorge’s funeral takes place at 12pm on Tuesday March 8 Bournemouth Crematorium.

For a full report see: http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/8876347.Celebrity_photographer__93_dies_at_his_Dorset_home/?ref=rss

and see: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0911557/ for a resume of his career and films he worked on

With the increasing cold winters we seem to be experiencing each year in the UK, I thought the following lecture and exhibit might be of interest to fellow BPH members wishing to pursue this area of photography.

Jim Simard, Head of the Alaska State Library Historical Collections, and Ron Klein, photographer and historian are on a search for the oldest photo taken in Alaska as part of their work in creating a new exhibit on early Alaskan photography. Using historical research techniques and an acute knowledge of early photographic processes, they are combing through numerous public and private collections to find the most interesting and earliest photographs of Alaska. If you can make it to Alaska on next Wed 2nd March, their presentation “Wet Plates in Cold Climates: Alaska’s Oldest Old Photograph—and Why” will be on from noon to1 p.m. at the Alaska State Museum as part of the Wednesday noon lecture series. And it's free entry when you get there!

Of interest to BPH members might be an exhibit, which will run through the summer of 2011, tentatively titled, “The First 25 Years of Alaskan Photography,” and will composed primarily of photographs and artifacts from the collections of the Alaska State Library, Archives and Museums.  The exhibit will feature images by masters of “wet plate” photography who made significant contributions to the fascinating story of photography in the Alaskan frontier.  The exhibit will feature images by early photographer Charles Ryder, who accompanied the Western Union Telegraph Expedition of 1866, creating the earliest known Alaskan photographs. It will include the work of professionals such as Eadweard J. Muybridge, H.H. Brodeck, William H. Partridge, and other masters of “wet plate” photography. Amateur photographers who made significant contributions to the development of the art will be included. Stereo images, “magic lantern” slides, hand tinted cabinet cards and tiny cart-de-visites all contribute to the fascinating story of photography in the Alaskan frontier. 

The full press release can be found here.

Great in Britain is a unique photographic archive of the British people at work. Photographers are invited to submit photographs that celebrate the understated pride and passion of the often unsung working heroes that form the bedrock of this great nation. This 'visual time capsule' will give a fascinating insight into the world of work in Britain, chronicling the diversity of skills that exist in this country, as well as the great innovation and endeavour.

greatinbritain.co.uk will become a unique resource, a visual time capsule that will build a legacy for the future and enable viewers to discover and appreciate those who live and work around them now.

Through the Great in Britain project, Barbour will curate an archive of images that celebrate the Rural Community in Britain. We want to see the people who live and work in the countryside, catalogue the variety and breadth of skills and vocations that exist, and showcase the contribution that they make to our society.

Eye Wonder: Photography From the Bank of America Collection is an ambitious collection of more than 100 works of contemporary photography by female artists from 1865 to 2004. Though Social Realist photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White are well-represented, more avant-garde examples get prime play.

The show begins with portraits, including the earliest piece, Julia Margaret Cameron's 1865 "Alfred, Lord Tennyson." The earlier ones tend to be of artistic notables, although they also feature Lange's photos of Depression-era migrants. Among those is probably the best-known image here, "Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.'' This then lead viewers to Giselle Freund's intimate photographs of Virginia Woolf, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp. The surreal dreamscapes of Sandy Skoglund — goldfish flying through a turquoise bedroom over the heads of a mother and son — find a cinematic partner in the massive posed film stills of Liza May Post.
Details of the exhibition can be found here.

Photo:  Sandy Skoglund's "Revenge of the Goldfish" is one of 115 pieces in the "Eye Wonder" exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Polar Visual Culture: An International Conference will take place in the Arts Building Lecture Theatre at the University of St Andrews on 17-18 June 2011.

Convened by Natalie Adamson and Luke Gartlan, this conference brings together a diverse, internationally recognised group of scholars to present new research on the visual culture of polar exploration. The polar environment, and its potential destruction, is now receiving heightened attention in the mass media, with extensive scientific study and urgent results on climate change reported daily. The conference aims to focus attention upon the unique, prolific and hitherto under-examined visual culture - with a strong focus on photography, but also including film, painting and graphic illustration, expedition and frontier narratives, installations and poetic geographies - that the expeditions to the two polar regions have inspired since the early nineteenth century, and which forms a fundamental part of our perception of these environments.

We invite all those interested in these themes to register for this important conference and join us in St Andrews. 

For further information, a list of speakers, and registration details, see the conference website:

http://www-ah.st-andrews.ac.uk/newsandevents/pvculture/

And for the conference poster: PVCposter.pdf