Ida Kar was an Armenian, a bohemian and a fiercely distinguished artist who made history. Her exhibition at the Whitechapel in 1960 has been described as the first one-person photography show to be held in a major London gallery, The Guardian reports. It made her name, but her fame has been slowly slipping away over the decades. It should now be revived thanks to a new look at her work at the National Portrait Gallery, full of striking images of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Ida Kar is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 from 10 March to 30 June. Some of her subjects, like herself, have drifted away towards neglect and obscurity, but others – Ionesco, Braque, Sartre, Shostakovich, Bertrand Russell, TS Eliot, Andre Breton, Doris Lessing, Bridget Riley, Ivon Hitchens – have held the frontline. She knew how to get hold of the famous and the about-to-be famous.

Born Ida Karamian in 1908 to Armenian parents in Russia, she served her apprenticeship and found both friends and a metier in modernist Paris in the late 1920s. In the 30s she rejoined her family in Egypt, where she married an Egyptian photographer with whom she set up a studio. She married her second husband, the artist and writer Victor Musgrave, in Cairo during the war, and the couple came to England in 1945, to austerity and Soho and the Colony Room club, to a land of coffee bars and struggling writers in bedsits. London became her home terrain, which she conquered by camera.