Paul Ickovic, photographer at home on the street, dies at age 79

Paul Ickovic, a traveling photographer whose sensual black-and-white portraits and evocative images of street life, captured in India, Nepal and Cuba, as well as European cities such as Paris and Prague, hark back to the mid-century heyday of street photography, passed away May 23 at his home in Prague. He turned 79.

His brother, Thomas Ickovic, said the cause was heart failure.

Mr. Ickovic (pronounced ick-OH-vick) was not a household name, nor was he a particularly prolific photographer. But he loved the variety of human experience, and he loved women, and he pursued both with energy and considerable charm. The camera was his way of doing that. His appearance was an asset: with his whimsical face and twinkling eyes, he was often compared to Keith Richards.

His approach has often been compared to that of his hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others whose idea of ​​’the decisive moment’ shaped the modern street photography and photojournalism that flourished in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times, called him “a wonderfully old-fashioned photographer.”

“Mr. Ickovic happened to be there when a woman, naked except for a gaudy necklace and a wisp of bikini that emphasized her extravagant flab, strode defiantly along a bank of the Seine while a lone male onlooker stared impassively,” Ms. Glueck wrote in the reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Ickovic’s work at a gallery in Chelsea in 2005. “Through the window of a Parisian subway as it pulled away from the station, he took in a mysterious, apparent silhouette of a man in a sinister hat, with one hand balancing a cane (It’s aptly titled ‘The Phantom’.) When a friend turned up for tea and impulsively donned a Mr. Ickovic bunny mask, the photographer quickly grabbed his camera for an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ shot. broadcast, amplified by a stunned cat as a spectator.”

The Cartier-Bresson approach, said Robert Klein, Mr. Ickovic’s old gallery owner, also dealt with the geometry that is embedded in a good photograph. “You find a background that will be your base and wait for something to happen for it,” Mr. Klein said over the phone. “Paul did that intuitively. But unlike Cartier-Bresson’ – whose habit was to remain invisible and even hide his camera – ‘Paul wanted and needed to connect with people.

‘Photography,’ continued Mr Klein, ‘was a way of getting to know them, and getting to know themselves. He could sneak a picture, but then he would befriend the subject.”

As Mr Ickovic told The Times in 1991, “I had tried to become a journalist but I was distracted by what was happening in the alley next to me.”

Critics and curators knew him for his outsized personality as well as for his work: he was gregarious, bombastic, guileless and opportunistic, irresistible and thoroughly maddening, with a taste for the good life that far exceeded his fortune. Those possessions were mostly nil, according to Mr. Klein, who described him as a sweet beggar and a skilled haggler. Because of his impulsiveness, he said, Mr. Ickovic was “always shooting himself in the foot”.

There was a time when he decided to burn all his negatives in his brother’s fireplace as a way to increase the value of his work. “He quickly realized that was a stupid idea,” his brother recalls, “and he searched the ashes to retrieve the negatives. Believe it or not, quite a few survived.”

Yet very little of his work is still available, said Mr. Klein, “because he often couldn’t find his negatives to make prints, or he wouldn’t have the money to make prints, or if he did, he would trade them for something else. I once lent him money for shoes, and he spent it on a wallet as a present for me. If he came to visit his car would be dead and I would have to pay to fix it to get rid of him.

Another time, Mr. Klein advanced him money for pictures he had sold for him at an art fair in the Hamptons, and Mr. Ickovic spent it all on a fancy watch, which he gave to Mr. Klein. And once he financed a trip to Cuba by selling his camera, which prevented him from taking pictures home. (On his Cuba trips, he invariably brought women’s lingerie with him, which he would use to trade for hotel rooms, meals, and other favours.)

Mr. Ickovic lived in Plainfield, Vt., among other places; Amherst, MA; Boston; and Sag Harbor, NY But wherever he landed, he’d soon fall behind on his rent or wear out his welcome as the guest of friends. When a landlord in Sag Harbor gave him the clearance, he moved into a storage unit, showering in an office building that kept the doors open at night. That arrangement worked for a few months, until the cameras in the storage facility caught up with him.

But his work speaks for itself. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography in New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington; the National Gallery in Prague; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

Mr. Ickovic nevertheless always struggled, stumbled by his own idiosyncrasies—but also, Mr. Klein said, by a developing market in photography. “Even by the 1970s,” he said, “taste had changed and the work of a romantic street photographer like Paul had become obsolete.”

Pavel David Ickovic was born on March 16, 1944 in Kettering, England. His Czechoslovak parents, Eugene Ickovic, a chemist, and Vera Mandl, met at a dance in London. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Prague, Vera had been sent to England to escape the German occupation; she trained as a nurse to assist in the war effort. Eugene was on leave from the Czech brigade, which fought alongside the British army. Most of their relatives died in concentration camps.

After the war, the Ickovics returned to Czechoslovakia, where Eugene opened a pharmaceutical factory in Karlovy Vary, before emigrating to Bogotá, Colombia, where he opened several factories and the family grew wealthy. After a military coup in Colombia in 1953, the family fled to Montreal with the help of a cousin and then to Forest Hills, Queens.

Paul studied music at Queens College before dropping out and traveling to Nepal and India in the late 1960s, flush with $1,000 given to him by his parents (the equivalent of nearly $10,000 in today’s dollars). New York street and fashion photographer Louis Faurer had been a mentor to him in New York, and at some point during that trip, Mr. Ickovic picked up a camera and began capturing what he saw on his travels.

Back home in the 1970s, he met Mr. Cartier-Bresson – Mr. Ickovic briefly worked for the publisher of Mr. Cartier-Bresson’s work in Boston – and they became friends and exchanged photographs. This would later prove useful: Mr. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs and letters gave Mr. Ickovic a bit of a nest egg.

In addition to his brother, Mr. Ickovic is survived by two sons: Nicholas Ickovic, from his second marriage, to Simona Zborilova, a model, which ended in divorce; and Cristian Sanders, from his relationship with Karin Sanders, a gallerist. His first marriage, to Sarah Stahl, also ended in divorce.

Over the years, Mr. Ickovic published a number of books on his photography, most notably “Kafka’s Grave and Other Stories” (1986), with an introduction by the playwright David Mamet. That book came about with the help of Joshua Ginsberg, an entrepreneur and environmental scientist turned friend and patron.

In the summer of 2021, the Bibliothèque Nationale showed a retrospective of Mr. Ickovic’s work, along with a larger exhibition of Mr. Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. Mr. Ginsberg published the catalog of his friend’s show, which was called “In Transit.”

Mr. Ickovic said he was a little annoyed, Mr. Ginsberg recalled, that “Henri has three rooms,” but “I only have one.”