Yousuf Karsh

Biography

“The Roaring Lion” was taken in Ottawa on 30 December 1941, in the Speaker’s Chamber of the House of Commons, a few minutes after Churchill had addressed the Canadian Parliament. The photographer had very little time. Churchill refused to take the cigar out of his mouth, and Karsh took it away himself a moment before pressing the shutter. The face in the picture is angry, the head thrust forward, one hand on the hip.

Later Churchill, by Karsh’s account, remarked that the photographer could make even a roaring lion sit for its portrait.

Yousuf Karsh was born on 23 December 1908 in Mardin, into an Armenian family: his father traded in imported goods, and his mother was the daughter of an engraver. His childhood fell in the years of the Armenian genocide. In 1922 the family fled to a refugee camp in Aleppo, a month-long journey with a Kurdish caravan. Some of his relatives were killed, and his sister died of starvation. “A strange mixture of blood and beauty, of persecution and peace,” he wrote later of those years. In 1923, at fifteen, his parents sent him to Canada to relatives, under a programme to reunite displaced Armenian families. He arrived in Halifax on 31 December 1923 by ship from Beirut and went straight to Sherbrooke, Quebec, to his maternal uncle George Nakash, a portrait photographer. He spoke little French and less English. He spent about a year at school, and that was the end of his education. His uncle gave him a simple Box Brownie camera and taught him to work in a studio: with a large-format camera, glass plate negatives and printing in the darkroom.

In 1928 Nakash sent his nephew to Boston as an assistant to John H. Garo, a well-known portrait photographer from the Armenian diaspora. Karsh watched Garo photograph Boston celebrities, and learned technique as well as how to talk to the people one has to photograph. In 1931 his temporary work permit expired, and he had to return to Canada.

In Ottawa he first worked for the photographer John Powis, and his first commissions came from local theatre groups. In 1932 he opened his own studio on the second floor of a building at 130 Sparks Street. He signed his work “Karsh of Ottawa”. The prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, noticed the young photographer and helped arrange sittings with dignitaries visiting the country. His portraits of Lord Bessborough, the Governor General, and his wife were widely published. From 1934 Karsh exhibited at the International Salon of Photography at the National Gallery of Canada.

His manner was defined by dramatic lighting. Before a sitting he studied his subject and talked to them, and often brought into the frame objects connected with the sitter’s profession. He explained his choice of sitters simply: he believed the world goes round through the efforts of the minority, not the majority.

After the Churchill portrait the stream of famous sitters did not stop. He photographed George Bernard Shaw (1943), Dwight D. Eisenhower (1946), Georgia O’Keeffe in her studio in New Mexico (1956), Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, at the Finca Vigía (1957), and Nikita Khrushchev in a fur collar (1963). Others among his sitters were Audrey Hepburn, Pablo Picasso, Walt Disney, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro and Yuri Gagarin. Of the hundred most famous people of the twentieth century on the 2000 list in International Who’s Who, he photographed fifty-one. In 1984, commissioned by the band Rush, he made the photograph for the cover of the album Grace Under Pressure. There were also commissions outside portraiture: for Ford Motor Company of Canada he photographed assembly-line workers in Windsor, Ontario, and his views of Rome and the Holy Land appeared in books made with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Karsh became a Canadian citizen on 3 January 1947, at the first citizenship ceremony. Among his books are “Faces of Destiny” (1946), “Portraits of Greatness” (1959) and “Karsh: A Fifty-Year Retrospective” (1983). Solo exhibitions were held at the National Gallery of Canada, in 1959 and 1989. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and received the Order of Canada: Officer in 1967, Companion in 1990. He was a visiting professor at Ohio University and at Emerson College in Boston. In 1972 the studio moved to the Château Laurier hotel, and in June 1992 Karsh closed it. In May 1993 he photographed President Bill Clinton and his wife, said to be his penultimate sittings. After that he stopped photographing, and in 1997 he settled in Boston. He died on 13 July 2002 in Boston, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was buried in Ottawa, at Notre-Dame Cemetery. His whole archive, about 150,000 negatives, has been held since 1987 by Library and Archives Canada.