( Camus photo by Karsh )
( Camus photo by Karsh )
( Camus photo by Karsh )
YOUSUF KARSH AND ALBERT CAMUS
“ There is a brief moment when all there is in a
man's mind and soul and spirit is reflected through his eyes, his hands, his
attitude. This is the moment to record”………Yousuf Karsh
“Within
every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to
reveal it if I can.”………Yousuf
Karsh
Yousuf
Karsh (1908-2002 ) was a master photographer of the 20th century. An Arabic speaking
Christian , he survived the Armenian Genocide that killed many of his family members . After
staying in a refugee camp in Syria for some time, Karsh moved to Canada permanently
in 1923. He was a visiting professor at Ohio University and at Emerson College in Boston. He happened to be a friend of Albert camus and accordingly, some of
the best portrait photographs of Albert Camus have been done by Karsh .
Karsh was a portrait photographer
who in 1941 took what became the most famous picture of Prime Minister Winston Churchill: the one where he stands, hand on hip,
glaring at the lens — and the one that appears on Britain’s 5-pound note. It was taken while Churchill was
in Canada, during an improvised shoot. Forty-eight of his portraits of American
personalities wre now on display at the University
of Miami in Coral Gables .
The 48 personalities are
individuals who stood out in everything from politics and science to film,
culture and business. Many are highly familiar images, such as the one of a
sweater-clad Albert Einstein, hands clasped over a tabletop; of the actor
Humphrey Bogart, posing with a burning cigarette; and of a smiling Eleanor
Roosevelt, a pencil between her fingers. The Karsh shots are also
“friendly pictures. They’re not ‘gotcha,’ they’re not paparazzi: they’re
respectful and engaging. Karsh portraits were (with the exception of that very
spontaneous Churchill shot) not spur-of-the-moment affairs. The photographer
would spend time talking to the subjects beforehand and do research on them. He
had sophisticated lighting in his studio to add contrast and drama to the shot.
During his career, Karsh held 15,312 sittings
and produced more than 370,000 negatives. Karsh’s subjects include Albert Camus ,Betty Low, Paul Robeson, Lord
Louis Mountbatten, General Charles de Gaulle, H. G. Wells, Nelson Rockefeller, King
Faisa, Yehudi Menuhin, Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Harry Truman, Clement
Attlee, Georges Braque, Bertrand Russel, Harold Wilson, Somerset Maugham, René
Clair, Christian Dior, Walt Disney, Sir Alexander Fleming, André Malraux, Audrey
Hepburn, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Charlton Heston, Jonas Salk, Jacqueline
Kennedy, Dag Hammarskjöld, Gina Lollobrigida, Alfred Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy,
Martin Luther King, Leonid Brezhne, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Ravi Shankar, Muhammad
Ali, Francois Mitterand, Sophia Loren, Ronald Reagan, Mother Teresa, Mikhail
Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, Jasper Johns, Nikita S.
Khrushchev , Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro , Andy Warhol,
Albert Einstein, Queen Elizabeth, Benazir Bhutto,Prince Philip, George Bernard
Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Albert Schweitzer, Helen Keller and
Pablo Picasso, and his photographs of them and thousands of others were
memorable as well. His photographs of many of the 20th century's great names in
the arts, politics and science made him one of the world's best-known portrait
photographers. Karsh was a master in capturing moods , inner feelings and
even something that was brewing up in the mind of his subject..In addition to ''Faces of
Destiny'' (1946) his books of portraits included ''Portraits of Greatness''
(1959), ''Faces of Our Time'' (1971) and ''Karsh Portraits'' (1976). Two other
books, ''Photographs of Yousuf Karsh: Men Who Make Our World'' (1967) and
''Karsh: A Fifty-Year Retrospective'' (1983).
About the genocide in Armenia wherefrom he had to flee, he
remembers this :-
“It was the bitterest of ironies that Mardin, whose tiers of
rising buildings were said to resemble the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
whose succulent fruits convinced its inhabitants it was the original Garden of
Eden, should have been the scene of the Turkish atrocities against the
Armenians in 1915. Cruelty and torture were everywhere; nevertheless, life had
to go on — albeit fearfully — all the while. Ruthless and hideous persecution
and illness form part of my earliest memories: taking food parcels to two
beloved uncles torn from their homes, cast into prison for no reason, and later
thrown alive into a well to perish; the severe typhus epidemic in which my
sister died, in spite of my mother’s gentle nursing. My recollections of those
days comprise a strange mixture of blood and beauty, of persecution and peace. In
1922, our family was allowed to flee. We had to leave our doors open — with us
we took no baggage, only our lives. And we had to flee on foot. During our
month-long journey with a Bedouin and Kurdish caravan, which would have taken
only two days by the forbidden train, my parents lost every valuable they had
managed to save. My father’s last silver coin went to rescue me after I was
caught foolishly making a sketch of piled-up human bones and skulls, the last
bitter landmark of my country.”
In 1998, Karsh celebrated his 90th birthday. Queen Elizabeth II opened
his exhibition, “Karsh in London,” at the renovated Canada House in Trafalgar
Square. That same year Karsh was honored with the Fox Talbot Award. He died in
Boston in July, 2002.
“ There is a brief moment when all there is in a man's mind and soul and spirit is reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record”.......Yousuf Karsh. .
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