Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh took the photograph of Churchill scowling because he had just removed the cigar from his mouth, and it is probably the most reproduced portrait of the twentieth century. He was born to an Armenian family in Mardin in the Ottoman empire, survived the genocide as a child - a sister died, an uncle was killed - and the family fled to Syria in 1922; he was sent on to an uncle in Quebec at sixteen with no English. He trained in Boston and set up in Ottawa. The Churchill portrait was made in December 1941, in two minutes allotted after a speech to the Canadian parliament; Churchill refused to put down the cigar, Karsh walked over and took it, and pressed the shutter on the expression that produced. It ran on the cover of Life and made his career. He photographed most of the century thereafter - Einstein, Hemingway, Churchill again, Castro, Martha Graham, Muhammad Ali, Queen Elizabeth - working with large-format cameras and elaborate lighting, always with the hands in view, and almost always after a long conversation first. Fifteen thousand sittings. He said his method was to look for the moment the mask came off. He worked until 1992. The Churchill sitting produced a second frame, taken immediately afterwards, in which Churchill is laughing; Karsh preferred it and nobody else did. He signed his prints Karsh of Ottawa. Twenty of his portraits were on the cover of Life. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, and the National Gallery of Canada and the Library of Congress hold his archives, some three hundred and fifty thousand negatives. He and his second wife Estrellita ran the studio together for forty years. He retired at eighty-four and died in Boston.

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