Hull of The Drakkar, Viking Ship Museum in Oslo - Norway, c. 1934

Dora Maar was a French photographer and artist whose photographic work developed in the context of interwar Paris. Born Henriette Théodora Markovitch, she trained in painting and photography at the Académie Julian, the École de Photographie de la Ville de Paris, and the Académie Lhote. 

Maar had an active and respected career as an avant-garde photographer andSurrealist artist. A prominent member of the Parisian avant-garde, her friends and lovers included Georges Bataille, Yves Tanguy, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and André Breton. Maar had originally studied painting but turned to photography after modeling for Man Ray's photographs. She produced portraits, nudes, landscapes, fashion photographs, and photomontages. Her montages frequently featured strong architectural elements and narratives. Among Surrealist circles, she was applauded for her understanding of the movement’s emphasis on naturalism; Maar also wrote poetry.

In the early 1930s she established a professional photography studio, producing fashion, advertising, and portrait commissions while simultaneously developing an independent photographic practice aligned with avant-garde circles. Maar’s photographic work from the 1930s is closely associated with Surrealism and socially engaged documentary photography. She produced constructed images, photomontages, and street photographs that explored dislocation, urban poverty, and the fragmenting effects of modern life. Works such as Portrait d’Ubu (1936) and her street photographs made in Paris, London, and Barcelona demonstrate her use of unconventional viewpoints, sharp contrasts, and symbolic imagery. During this period, she was also politically active, participating in leftist intellectual circles and contributing to publications aligned with anti-fascist movements.

In 1934 Maar visited Norway as part of a longer study journey through England and the Scandinavian countries. The pictures of the Drakkar skip is one of the best known from this trip. 

From the late 1930s onward, Maar’s photographic production declined as she increasingly focused on painting and drawing. She documented Pablo Picasso’s Guernica between 1937 and 1938, producing a systematic photographic record of the work’s development. In later decades, she lived largely withdrawn from public artistic life, returning intermittently to photography through experimental and abstract work. Posthumous reassessment has demonstrated her photography as a significant contribution to both Surrealist practice and twentieth-century documentary photography.