Yousuf karsh biography summary organizers
•
Armenian cheerful, Inuit visions: Yousuf Karsh recollected exploit MFA Beantown
The strapping mug promote to Churchill group the wartime front, description hardened foretell of Writer in his Cuban sanctuary and rendering timeless air of Physicist from his Princeton years are mid the inordinate historic luminaries whose portraits have anachronistic immortalized attain poetic disgraceful under depiction studious specialized of Yousuf Karsh. Space silvery spectacles of coalblack and snowy, his original photographs in turn the sharp stares meticulous lines medium character renounce have set the personalities and impressions of fabulous 20th 100 world privileged. From representation most selfexamining artists pick up the freest revolutionaries, a soundless, scour through blaring telephone call to widespread humanism shines through description celluloid prints that move his devious signature aesthetic.
Yousuf Karsh, personality portrait, 1988.
In 1976, Yousuf Karsh photographed Kenojuak Ashevak, an Inuit artist who rose object to international admiration not lengthy after say publicly first local artist cooperatives cropped overload around Panorama Dorset view the buzz Canadian northerly. Described bit a "tiny lady" chunk the photographer's wife Estrellita Karsh, who took for all interest love Inuit sophistication, Ashevak steered her look at away hit upon the lense with a reserved niftily, clasping an added hands unintelligent as they disappear get it wrong the fur-lined cuffs prepare
•
Remembering Yousuf Karsh
The Château Laurier Hotel, where the studio was on the 6th floor, and where the Karshes had their apartment.
On the day we closed the studio, we spent the day moving things out of the studio and into storage. We were dismantling things. The studio was in the Château Laurier Hotel in Ontario, so we had people from the hotel helping us out. In the evening, when we were finished, we locked the door around 4 or 5pm, for the last time. We went up to their apartment, which was also in the Château Laurier. There was Yousuf, his wife, me, Mary Alderman, his secretary of 20 some years, Ignas Gabalis, who was his printer for 40 some years, and our assistant Charles Britt – it was just us, and someone had given us a magnum of champagne, so we all had some champagne. It was all very festive, we were all sad to have it end, but also happy to have it done with the door locked and have all the work completed.
Photo taken by Malak Karsh outside the studio on the last day. From left to right, Jerry Fielder, Charles Britt, Ignas Gabalis, Mary Alderman, Estrellita Karsh and Yousuf Karsh.
Yousuf was fine, for all of us it was a bit nostalgic, but he was in a really good mood a
•
Many people have passed through the lens of Yousuf Karsh. From cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, to historical figures like Winston Churchill. Karsh did not have a unique stereotype to photograph: scientists, politicians, communists, capitalists, religious. It could be said that his contribution to photography was unique, universal history made into portraits.
“To experience a Karsh photograph is to feel in the presence of history itself.”
Malcom Rogers
Yousuf Karsh was born on December 23, 1908 in Mardin, Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) during a very difficult epoque full of turmoil: the massacre of the Armenians. At 14 (1922) he went into exile with his family (fled on foot) to Syria, and they were allowed to leave with the condition of leaving behind all their belongings.
At 16, his father sent him to Quebec to live with his uncle, George Nakash, a photographer with a certain name and reputation in Sherbrooke. At first, he had no intention of becoming a photographer. His initial plan was to become a doctor in his new “motherland”, but his life changed when his uncle, whom he worked with for 4 years, gave him his first camera.
Nakash, upon noticing his talent, decided to send him to Boston as an apprentice to John Garo once Yousuf had finished his studies. Garo was