MONTREAL — Winston Churchill, determined. Albert Einstein, ethereal. Eleanor Roosevelt, engaging. Andy Warhol, whimsical. Pablo Picasso, intense. Georgia O’Keeffe, pensive.
Here, assembled in something of a Global Portrait Gallery, are Karsh’s People — the men and women whom Yousuf Karsh captured in peerless portrait photographs, brought together as kind of a dream team of politics and the arts and on display for months at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In a half-hour stroll through a hushed walkway, the visitor had a glimpse of much of the history and culture of the West (and occasionally beyond) in the 20th century, the product of one man’s camera and his unerring eye.
Karsh died 20 years ago this week in Boston, leaving a brash statement at odds with the conventional wisdom of historians. His photographs scream a rebuttal to the notion that history is not the story of great men and great women.
One of his most affecting portraits is of Mr. and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, taken in 1957, three years before the Massachusetts senator mounted his presidential campaign. In this context, it is entirely appropriate that his wife, Jacqueline, is in the photograph, taken at Manhattan’s Sherry-Netherland apartment hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street.
It was Kennedy to whom the sentence “One person can make a difference, and everyone should try” is popularly attributed. But there is no evidence that he ever said it. It was Mrs. Kennedy — photographed alone on another occasion by Karsh, at Hammersmith, her mother’s Newport, Rhode Island, home — who made that remark, a year after her husband’s death.
The men and women in the Karsh gallery all made a difference, usually by trying hard, though the artistry of the cellist Pablo Casals (photographed from the rear in the ruins of an early French abbey in 1954) and the ballerina Karen Kain (captured in midflight at the Karshes’ Little Wings home in Ottawa in 1977) made their brilliance seem easy. It wasn’t easy, of course. Nor was the mastery of the actor Paul Robeson (“His magnificent voice turned the theater into a cathedral,” Karsh said of his performance before the portrait session in 1941), or that of the pianist Glenn Gould (photographed at his Toronto home in 1957, when Karsh said his rendering of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Alban Berg “was so arresting that I found myself captivated, forgetful of camera shutters and lights”).
But often the artistry of Karsh himself came from making his subjects be forgetful of camera shutters and lights. So it was with perhaps his most enduring image, that of Prime Minister Churchill at the height of Britain’s World War II peril. The setting was the Ottawa meeting between Churchill and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who did not tell his visitor he had arranged for Karsh to make a portrait.
This surprise irritated Churchill, who banged his fist on a table, protested that he was caught unawares, and was hardly mollified by the presentation of a new cigar, which he refused to relinquish when Karsh attempted to proceed with his work. “And without any premeditation but with infinite respect, I took the cigar from his lips,” the photographer recalled later. “By the time I got back the 4 feet I was from the camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me.”
Then the man was captured in full, the ultimate redemption of the phrase “close, but no cigar.”
Karsh was no Charles “Teenie” Harris, the famous photographer for the fabled Pittsburgh Courier newspaper known as One-Shot Harris, whose gift for a single click illuminated the pages of the nation’s leading Black newspaper from 1936 to 1975. Karsh conducted 15,312 sittings and produced more than 370,000 negatives of figures from Berenice Abbott, the photographer of New York’s architectural richness, to Ossip Zadkine, the Belarus-born sculptor and painter.
Born in Armenia, Karsh reached Halifax in Canada by ocean liner in 1925. “For the moment, it was enough to find myself safe, the massacres, torture and heartbreak of Armenia behind me,” he recalled. “I had no money and little schooling, but I had an uncle, my mother’s brother, who was waiting for me and recognized me from a crude family snapshot as I stepped from the gangplank.”
From such modest beginnings, many North American careers of genius began, and it was Karsh’s fate to capture many of those figures.
That uncle gave him a camera, and the rest is history, or more properly the recording of images of some of the great figures of history. He opened a studio in Canada’s capital — for years his headquarters was the majestic Chateau Laurier, then as now the hostelry of choice in Ottawa — and got his big break when Mackenzie King invited him to make the image that personified Churchill.
Soon the world became his workplace. “Any room in the world where I could set up my portable lights and camera — from Buckingham Palace to a Zulu kraal, from miniature Zen Buddhist temples in Japan to the splendid Renaissance chambers of the Vatican — would become my studio.” His work ranges from the Calgary Stampede to the Moroccan desert.
Some of his critics complained that Karsh made all his subjects look the same. “It was like complaining that Rembrandt’s paintings did not make you laugh,” retorted The Economist in its 2002 obituary.
It was the Karsh personality that helped create photographs that captured the personality of his subjects.
“Look and think before opening the shutter,” he once said. “The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera. If it is a likeness alone, it’s not a success.”
Karsh was in the Chateau Frontenac, the iconic railroad hotel in Quebec City, when he faced the challenge of a photograph of Nelson Mandela shortly after his 1990 release from South African confinement. He told the anti-apartheid leader a silly joke “and everything about the sitting changed.”
For years, and even now, he was simply Karsh of Ottawa, a single name conjuring up a figure so well known that — as in the case of Moses, Homer, Socrates, Cher and Beyonce — the usual appellations are not necessary. Indeed, in portrait photography, Karsh is not only a single word, but the last word.
