Where did Yousuf Karsh get his real start in photography? It may seem an absurd question: Every Canadian of a certain age knows the tale of Karsh's leap into the pantheon when, one fateful December day in 1941, given a mere five minutes to capture an image of Winston Churchill in the Speaker's Chamber at the House of Commons, he snatched a cigar out of his subject's mouth and quickly snapped a portrait that was electric with indignation.
But at a press preview this week for an exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts celebrating Karsh's centenary, his widow, Estrellita, argued that the roots of his artistry first took hold in this New England city, where he spent three years apprenticed to the photographer John Garo at a studio on Boylston Street.
"For Yousuf, it happened in Boston and it remained in Boston," said Estrellita Karsh, who noted that her late husband, after moving to the city in 1928, had spent long hours at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) studying light, design, and composition; he called the museum his "spiritual home" and his "university."
"When he was here, he was poor, and where do you go? You go to places that are free, and luckily the museum was free. He was a young man who really hadn't seen much beauty in his youth - he was in the [Armenian]massacres. Can you imagine how he felt, coming to a museum, and seeing all the beautiful things? He remembered it, and it nourished him for the rest of his life."
With a twinkle in her eye and a spitfire spirit that charmed the press, Estrellita Karsh recalled that working with Garo gave her husband the opportunity to meet with and observe the private behaviour of some of the elder photographer's friends, including Serge Koussevitzky and Arthur Fiedler. "It was Prohibition, and little Yousuf would mix the bathtub gin, and once these people were imbibing, he would stand at the top of the stairs, ears open, and he listened to them, and he decided these were people he wanted to portray."
The Prohibition story has been told many times before, but still drew a knowing and nostalgic laugh from the assembled guests. (Estrellita, a petite woman in her late 70s, possessed of a fierce intelligence and a sharp smile, plays crowds like a virtuoso violinist. And Boston loves her: She and Yousuf moved here from Ottawa in 1997; he died in 2002, but she still calls it home.)
Six years after Karsh's death, there seems precious little to discover about his life or his career. Still, the exhibition, titled Karsh 100: A Biography in Images, aims to provide a fuller picture of his output.
It offers not just his famous pictures of famous people but also lesser known works such as the production stills he shot for an Ottawa theatre company in the 1930s and portraits of Canadian factories in the 1950s for use in annual reports. And though there are mementoes and artifacts from Karsh's life - one of his cameras, and his trademark hat, loaned by the Canada Science and Technology Museum - the exhibition's notion of biography is slim. Like most of the portraits he produced over a career that spanned more than 60 years, it is consumed with surfaces, and excels in the same area as its subject: the burnishing of myth.
For though Churchill's family reportedly loathed that iconic portrait, Karsh quickly gained a reputation as an artist whose work would flatter his subjects. Anne Havinga, the MFA's senior curator of photographs, says he "had an uncanny ability to make his very famous sitters feel comfortable, and feel that this photographer could secure their reputation, and not make a picture of some aspect they'd rather not reveal."
Together with Jerry Fielder, the director of the Karsh Estate and a former assistant to the photographer, Havinga has curated a show that traces "little Yousuf's" fast rise from apprentice to unofficial court photographer (the Queen sat for him five times, and he photographed every U.S. President from Truman to Clinton) and the portraitist of choice for literary celebrities (Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Sandburg, W.H. Auden) and film stars (Audrey Hepburn, Anita Ekberg, Humphrey Bogart and many others).
Karsh's extraordinary career as an independent photographer began in 1930, when he left Garo's tutelage and set up his own studio in Ottawa, choosing to live in the nation's capital for the access to, as Estrellita says, "people who mattered."
He joined the Ottawa Drama League, which gave him two major gifts: After having worked only in natural light under Garo, he was astonished to discover the possibilities of incandescent, theatrical lighting. The theatre's ties to Ottawa society also proved beneficial, its members including Lord Duncannon, the son of Lord Bessborough, the Governor-General, who in 1935 became the first official to sit for Karsh.
(The theatre was also where Karsh met the actress and dancer Solange Gauthier; the two wed in 1939 and were happily married until she died of cancer in 1960. He met Estrellita in 1961, and they married the following year.)
In short order, William Lyon Mackenzie King became Karsh's patron, which led to assignments of increasing importance, including a 1936 photo of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
But it was the Churchill snap that made his career and, according to legend, also helped restore the flagging spirit of the British people during a particularly low point in their battle with Germany. The exhibition smartly highlights how Karsh recognized not only the power of the images he made but also the importance of their back stories; his photographs, after all, didn't just market themselves. In a glass case a few feet from the Churchill portrait, the MFA has included a two-page typed statement by Karsh entitled Now It Can Be Told About Churchill's Portrait, in which he retails the story of that famous five-minute sitting.
"When magazines and others asked for a print of this picture, this statement would go out with it, so they would have the story as well," observes Havinga.
Less than two years later, he travelled to London by boat, in a wartime convoy, to photograph members of the Royal Family, including the 16-year-old Princess Elizabeth. His statement about the sitting of King George VI, typed on Savoy Hotel stationery, which is included in the show, was used as the basis of an essay that accompanied the reproduction of the photo in later books. When Karsh was summoned back to London in 1951, the assignment was immortalized in a British tabloid press clipping that breathlessly reported his jet-setting ways, making it clear that he was by then leading as glamorous a lifestyle as his subjects.
By the time Morley Safer came calling with a 60 Minutes crew in 1977, Karsh was the elder statesman of the celebrity-industrial complex. At a reception on Monday evening, Safer recalled the difficulty he'd encountered in reporting the profile, which is included in the show. "We'd wanted to shoot him doing a portrait of somebody, and he refused. He said it would be an imposition on the subject. He was such an extraordinarily discreet man about his subjects; he would not talk at all about them except in the most positive terms, even though some of them were pretty nasty creatures."
In the early 1950s, Karsh turned his myth-making talents to corners of his young country that were not as obviously glamorous as the celebrities banging down his door. "He was very inspired by the attempt of the world to rebuild after the war, and very inspired by the people who were doing that rebuilding," says Fielder. Karsh's photographs of Atlas Steel factories and workers, taken for an annual report, transformed brutal industrial elements into a balletic play of light and shadow, and bore an inclination for heroism. Others taken on assignment for Ford of Canada featured a balance and composition rarely seen in his individual portraits.
(Sometimes, though, his experiments with multiple plates, which enabled him to layer one or more images on top of each other, reflected more of an interest in composition than content: One Ford photo features a pair of auto workers in the foreground who seem to be sharing a soft, homoerotic moment, of which Karsh was evidently unaware.)
In 1952, Maclean's magazine commissioned Karsh to travel across the country for the Canadian Cities Project. The resulting photos, which were bound into a bestselling book that helped form Canada's sense of itself, included a portrait of a hushed crowd in Quebec ascending a set of stairs; a lyrical shot of a worker at the Great Lakes Paper Co. in Fort William, Ont., (now Thunder Bay) eating his lunch atop a gargantuan wave of white; and a very un-Karsh-like image from the Calgary Stampede: a tangle of cowboys and horses and ropes seeping out from within a cloud of dust, that, as rendered in the gelatin silver print included in the MFA show, has an almost Impressionistic diffuseness.
Those shots of the Canadian heartland exhibit a lightness of touch and a willingness to react to circumstances that we don't normally associate with Karsh. And his early pictures, from a soft-focus 1927 landscape that won him a cash prize from the T. Eaton Co., to a handful of modernist experiments in which he seems interested primarily in the formal aspects of his sitters, are small revelations that make the viewer wish he had let go and allowed his fancy to guide him more often.
Karsh's signature style, forged in the late 1930s and deployed until the final sittings in the early 1990s, is resolutely classical and frustratingly reductive. With few exceptions, we see knotted hands and furrowed brows: signifiers of Deep Thought and complex psychology. While his mid-century contemporaries were showing a cross-disciplinary cosmopolitanism, Karsh remained the workmanlike, albeit supremely gifted, technician: solid, earnest, and almost humourless. Which is to say - despite Boston's claim through Karsh 100 - that he was purely Canadian.
Simon Houpt