Yousuf Karsh — Remarkable Armenians

Four Remarkable things about Yousuf Karsh

As a teenager, he crosses the ocean-going to a country with 2 unfamiliar languages – French and English.
Gave up one dream for the reality of a good trade. and spent many years perfecting his trade.
Acted on good advice and accepted new challenges
Paid it forward by accepting photography graduates as apprentices.

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) was an Armenian-Canadian master photographer. He photographed most of the very important people of the 20th century. How does a man from a small town in the Ottoman Empire meet and photograph the great figures of the last century?

Yousuf’s family survived the Genocide and were allowed to leave the area in 1922 with only the clothes on their backs. They fled to Aleppo, Syria where they tried to rebuild their lives. Somehow his father saved enough money to send Yousuf to Canada, to his brother-in-law, George Nakash, an established photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

Yousuf began working for his uncle in the summer of 1926 giving up his desire to study medicine. He soon realized that he was interested in everything connected to the art of photography. It would become his livelihood and passion.

He began taking pictures of the fields and woods nearby with a small camera. He photographed a landscape with children playing and gave it to a classmate as a Christmas gift. His friend entered it in a contest and Yousuf won first prize - $50!

Yousuf Karsh with his mentor, John Garo, 1930 (karsh.org)

Soon after, his uncle arranged an apprenticeship with John H. Garo of Boston who was recognized as the outstanding portraitist in the eastern states. Garo encouraged Yousuf to attend classes in art and to study the work of the great masters. He learned about lighting, design and composition. His original plan to spend 6 months in Boston extended to 3 years. He learned the many techniques needed in great photography but more than that, Garo taught him to see and to remember what he saw. “Understand clearly what you are seeking to achieve and when it is there, record it”.

He left Boston in 1931 and moved to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, hoping for the opportunity to photograph its leading citizens and many foreign visitors. He met B.K. Sandwell, the editor of Saturday Night, a prestigious periodical which reproduced his photographs for the first time. Yousuf was invited to join the Ottawa Little Theatre where he learned more about the effect of artificial lighting on a production. One of the actors there was the son of the Governor General who asked his parents to sit for Yousuf. This led to the portrait appearing in various newspaper across Canada and England.

https://karsh.org/winston-churchill-by-yousuf-karsh-on-british-five-pound-note/

In 1936 he was invited to photograph Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first American President to pay an official visit to Canada. He met the Canadian Minister Mackenzie King at that visit and the two men became friends. It was King who made it possible for Yousuf to photograph Winston Churchill in December 1941. As Yousuf said “The world’s reception of that photograph – which captured public imagination as the epitome of the indomitable spirit of the British people – changed my life.” The image of Winston Churchill was used for the British five pound note.

With Albert Einstein, Princeton, 1948, Yousuf Karsh with Albert Einstein, Princeton, 1948 (karsh.org)

Yousuf went on to photograph many of the world’s most-prominent people including royalty, statesmen, artists and writers. Over the years six books of his photographs were published, the last in 1996 entitled “Karsh, A Sixty-Year Retrospective”. By the time he retired in 1992, over 20 of his photographs appeared on the cover of Life magazine and he was recognized as one of the best-known and great portrait photographers of the 20th Century.

During the last years of his career Karsh accepted outstanding photography graduates to work with him for two years – a one-on-one apprenticeship. In 1979, Jerry Fielder, a young man from Monterey, California who was most interested in the curatorial aspects of photography began to put Karsh’s archives in order. In 1987, the archives, which included his negatives as well as his transparencies and prints, were acquired by the National Archives of Canada. The current Karsh collection there has 355,000 items. Karsh’s work is on display permanently at many museums around the world.

Karsh was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of the United Kingdom.

The Karsh Award, dedicated to Yousuf and his brother Malak Karsh, is awarded by the City of Ottawa every two years to an established professional artist for outstanding artistic work in a photo-based medium.

A book, “Yousuf Karsh & John Garo: The Search for a Master’s Legacy”, published in 2016 is the story of the greatest portrait photographer of his time and the Boston mentor who taught him the ropes as a young man. You can also visit karsh.org for more pictures and facts about Yousuf Karsh.