This image, known as Rear Window, features Ford of Canada factory worker Gow Crapper. Karsh spent two weeks at Ford of Canada’s Windsor plant in 1951, and produced some of his best industrial photographs.
In her book, Portrait in Light and Shadow, Maria Tippets writes: “…Rear Window has become a classic. And this is not just because the photograph of Gow Crapper is tightly composed and beautifully lit. It is because the image predates the working-class counterculture heroes that actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando would come to exemplify a few years later.”
Karsh photographs from Ford of Canada will be on view in “The Sweat of their Face: Portraying American Workers” at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., opening November 3, 2017.