Francis Haar
Francis Haar's portrait of artist Juliette May Fraser
is part of the "Portraits in Tribute" exhibit
at Queen Emma Gallery.
Photographs
capture the essence
of the artists
Francis Haar's work
By Nadine Kam
conveys the elegance of decades past
Star-BulletinSurvival in the arts is never guaranteed, so now that the Queen Emma Gallery has made it to a ripe old age of 20, director Masa Taira decided it is time to celebrate. She has pulled together an exhibition that honors many of the artists, advisors and volunteers who made the gallery a success.
"Portraits in Tribute" features two- and three-dimensional self-portraits of invited artists. But Taira had difficulty finding portraits of some of the gallery's earliest advisors, among them David Asherman, Juliette May Fraser and Jean Charlot. For portraits of these late artists, Taira turned to the work of photographer Francis Haar.
Now 88, Haar has Alzheimer's disease and is too frail to appear in public, but his work continues to speak to viewers with eloquence and grace.
Taking over the task of locating the negatives and prints of the past 50 years is Haar's son Tom, also a photographer. Although Tom Haar spent much of his career in New York as a free-lance photographer and artist focusing on abstract cityscapes, he returned home 10 years ago to care for his parents.
Today, the younger Haar, 55, is working on a book, a retrospective of his father's career, which he hopes will be in print by this time next year.
Although it's natural to assume Francis' work inspired his son's career choice, Tom said, "I never thought of myself as following in his footsteps."
Tom had envisioned himself as a graphic designer, but a University of Hawaii project involving a photographic study of reflection, changed his career path.
"That got me started. I had never worked in a dark room. I saw my father taking photos and helped him a few times on documentary films, but it was only at this point that it became more natural. I became very interested in photography and kept going."
In that way, his career bears similarity to his father's. Francis Haar had been an architect in his native Hungary in the 1930s. He began taking pictures to document completed projects, and he too, never looked back.
Tom said that his father once told him he preferred photography to architecture because in taking pictures, one could retain control of the work from beginning to end. In architecture, one might plan the work, but the finishing is left to various engineers.
Even so, Tom said his father was not a control freak.
"He wasn't that much of a perfectionist. I felt awkward when I realized that he didn't use a timer in the dark room and didn't even use an exposure meter.
"In the past, photographers relied more on guesswork. Now, everything is studied, from exposures even to Ansel Adams' zone system, in which tones of gray are calculated in making prints.
"In that sense, my father worked intuitively, rather than scientifically."
That intuitive sense about his work and subjects helped in the portraiture Francis Haar was famous for. He enjoyed meeting and talking with people.
Through various friendships and projects, he found himself moving from Hungary to France, then on to Japan, Chicago and finally, to Hawaii. He had been assigned to work on a documentary on author James Michener's Ukiyo-e collection. Michener was working on his novel, "Hawaii," at the time.
Tom Haar has not yet adopted digital photography because work in the new medium does not approach the richness of photographic images on film. He doesn't think his father would have adopted the new equipment either.
"Once he found equipment he was comfortable with, he stayed with that. It's important to be unaware of the equipment when you're working because you want to concentrate on the subject, not the equipment.
"If you're always aware of the equipment, it becomes a handicap."
Still, computers may hold the answer to his current dilemma, which is, how to store his father's prints and negatives, and his own as well, so they might survive the next 50 years.
Portraits in Tribute
Exhibit: Self-portraits by various artists and photographs by Francis Haar
