Works of famous photographers in the world will be featured at “Society, Studio & Street” exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London to last through May 30.
The exhibition will highlight photographs by Emil Otto Hoppe and Ida Kar.
Emil Otto Hoppe (1878-1972), the son of a Munich banker, settled in London where he became renowned for taking pictures of the celebrated. Many of his sitters from the first half of the 20th century are still pretty big names in 2011: Arthur Conan Doyle, Einstein, Mussolini, Henry James.
Hoppe’s retirement overlapped with the career of Ida Kar (Karamyan), whose work is the focus of a related exhibition also at the NPG, “Bohemian Photographer” (until June 19). Kar (1908-74), was another expatriate in London. Armenian in origin, she lived and worked in Egypt before coming to Britain in 1945.
Her scope was narrower than Hoppe’s, and her active career shorter. As the title of the show suggests, Kar’s essential subject was the artistic and literary world of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was an austere era and Kar caught it well: Iris Murdoch writing a novel on a drab bedroom floor, various sculptors and abstract painters in stark-looking studios.
She shared a few sitters with Hoppe, among them the author Somerset Maugham.
