John Murray
Yousuf Karsh was born
on December 23 1908 at Mardin, Armenia, the son of an illiterate merchant,
and grew up amid the Turkish genocide which saw two of his uncles killed
in jail. The family escaped to Syria in a month-long journey with a
Kurdish caravan.
Aged 16, speaking no English and little French, Yousuf was dispatched to
join an uncle whom he had never met, at Sherbrooke, Quebec. For a time he
went to school, hoping to study medicine, but his course was set when his
uncle gave him a Box Brownie. Soon after, one of his landscapes, put into
a competition by a fellow pupil, won the $50 first prize.
Karsh joined his uncle's photographic business, then spent three years in
Boston, Massachusetts, with John Garo, an Armenian photographer. Garo
advised him to study Velasquez and Rembrandt, and taught him how to use
natural light and to make bathtub gin for the studio's customers. At the
end of his apprenticeship, the pupil returned to Canada, where he
established himself in the capital under the grandiloquent title "Karsh of
Ottawa".
One of his earliest ventures was to join an amateur drama group, where he
met his first wife, Solange Gauthier, and was introduced to the
possibilities of artificial lighting. He also encountered Viscount
Duncannon, son of the Earl of Bessborough, the Governor-General, who
commissioned a portrait. The photographer was so nervous that the pictures
were over-exposed and had to be redone.
But Karsh soon won the patronage of Mackenzie King, who invited him to
photograph President Roosevelt on a visit to the Quebec Citadel. Karsh did
not have his equipment set up in time for the general press conference.
But when everyone else had gone, King reappeared on the terrace with
Roosevelt on the arm of a son and the new Governor-General Lord Tweedsmuir
(the novelist John Buchan). They obligingly stood self-consciously erect.
Karsh pretended to take the picture and thanked the group, at which point
they relaxed as Tweedsmuir launched into an anecdote. Then Karsh took his
first photograph to attract international attention.
In 1943, the success of the Churchill portrait enabled Karsh to cross the
Atlantic to produce a series of highly-acclaimed pictures of the major
figures in wartime Britain, among them General Montgomery - who was the
first to claim that he had been "Karshed" - General Eisenhower, George VI,
Noel Coward, and William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
With the return of peace, Karsh found that the great and the good were
more than willing to welcome him into their houses. They would visit him
at his sixth-floor suite in Ottawa's Chateau Laurier Hotel, where he plied
his trade to visiting businessmen, though his lack of interest in at least
some of them is clear.
British and Canadian prime ministers, American presidents, all the Popes
(with the exception of the shortlived John Paul I) and many Hollywood
stars raced to submit themselves to Karsh's conspiratorial camera.
He showed the poet Robert Frost sprawled in an armchair; pictured the
cellist Pablo Casals playing Bach from behind; showed Jimmy Carter in a
worried mood; and captured Ronald Reagan bursting into a smile.
A favourite subject, from her childhood onwards, was the Queen, whom over
the decades he portrayed, as few other photographers have done, smiling
and relaxed. When one of his seven portraits of her appeared on the front
of a Canadian $1 bill, a landscape of logs on the river Ottawa by his
brother Malak appeared on the back.
There were more sessions with Churchill. Just before he stepped down as
prime minister Karsh missed a chance to catch him drinking. "The world
knows of my virtue," the old man said as he downed a glass of wine at a
gulp while they prepared for a session. But there was a final Karsh
photograph taken shortly before Churchill's death showing him frail and
holding a cigar, though with still commanding eyes.
Perhaps for reasons of tact, Karsh admitted that one of his greatest
failures was Mackenzie King, whose portraits suggested a colourless
executive rather than the master of ruthless political intrigue that he
was.
Although best-known for his portraits, Karsh collaborated with the
American Bishop Fulton Sheen on books about the landscapes of Rome and the
Holy Land. He also did some industrial work for large motor car companies,
a colour assignment on arctic wildflowers for Time magazine and an annual
poster for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America.
An intense, dapper man, Karsh lived for many years in a house outside
Ottawa called "Little Wings", so called because it was on a migratory
route for birds. It contained many works of art by well-known artists, but
only one photograph, showing his beautiful second wife, Estrellita Nachbov,
whom he married after his first wife's death in 1961.
Karsh, who was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1990 and
moved to Boston on his retirement in 1992, liked to play down claims for
his work. "My best," he would say, "could be the picture I take tomorrow."
