French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist Francois Mauriac died on September 1, 1970 (b. 1885).

Karsh wrote: “Paris was without electric power when I photographed the eminent Catholic writer. My assistant and I had valiantly climbed five endless Parisian flights of stairs with heavy equipment, in the vain hope that electricity would soon be restored. It was late in the afternoon and we would not soon have the opportunity to meet again. So, using a bed sheet borrowed from his housekeeper as a reflector, I caught his aristocratic silhouette in the available light of an open French window.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, 1908  (d. 1973). LBJ was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963 under President John F. Kennedy. Johnson’s presidency began following the assassination of President Kennedy. Johnson’s domestic policy was aimed to create programs that would expand civil rights, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education and the arts, urban and rural development, and public services. Johnson coined the term the “Great Society” in 1964 to describe these efforts. Read more (Wikipedia).

American lawyer and politician Edward “Ted” Kennedy died on this day, August 25, in 2009 (b. 1932). Kennedy served as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. Karsh photographed his elder brother Senator John F. Kennedy and John’s wife Jacqueline in 1957, and John F. Kennedy solo in 1960, shortly before he was elected president. He photographed Robert Kennedy in 1962 while he was attorney general in his elder brother’s administration.

Canadian politician and journalist René Lévesque was born on this day, August 24, in 1922 (d. 1987). Lévesque served as premier of Quebec from 1976 to 1985.

Starting his career as a reporter, and radio and television host, he later became known as an ardent defender of Quebec sovereignty and was the founder of the Parti Québécois. Read more (Wikipedia).

Karsh photographed the celebrated American artist Norman Rockwell in 1956. Look closely, and you can see Rockwell’s sketches of Karsh as he set up his cameras and lighting.

Karsh wrote about their meeting:

He was enthusiastic in 1956 on hearing that I wished to photograph him and sent a car from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to fetch me from New York. On reaching his studio, I found a note on the door telling me: “Please come in and make yourself at home. I will be back at one.” My host arrived shortly afterwards, took me to lunch with some of his friends, and then we got down to work. I wanted to emphasize one of his famous Four Freedom paintings as originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, and we chose Freedom of Religion [sic] to appear in the background of my portrait. Mr. Rockwell seemed intensely interested in my methods, and I soon realized that photography is an essential ingredient of his own art. He told me he employed a regular photographer who, upon his instructions, took pictures of suitable candidates for his paintings. These pictures, blown up to the right size, are pasted over one another or placed in juxtaposition until the painter has exactly the joint effect he wants – a kind of collective model, I suppose. The characters distilled by his brush follow no particular tradition, he told me, but only “human interest” and a very cheerful realism. The artist should be an entertainer, not a crusader… I asked him if technique could be exalted over integrity. “Technique,” he retorted, “is a matter of self-expression. If integrity goes, technique alone cannot save it.”

Mr. Warren K. Cook was photographed on January 31, 1945. There are 243 Sitters listed in Mr. Karsh’s records for that year, and with upwards of 15,000 Sittings in total (fully searchable in this website), it isn’t possible for us to have an image that represents each of them. Fortunately, Warren Cook’s grandson has an original print and sent us a digital copy of this lovely portrait.

It is usually a surprise for people when they learn that Yousuf Karsh photographed Dizzy Gillespie. The jazz musician posed in 1990, for Karsh’s American Legends project. In the book, Karsh wrote: “Although the co-inventor of bebop “changed the whole concept of American music,” the trumpet was not his instrument of first choice. Luckily for the development of jazz, his arms were too short for the trombone!”

See the other notable people who were photographed in 1990 and 1991 for American Legends.

Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899. He was photographed for TV Guide in 1960, the same year he released his masterpiece, Psycho. Despite his status as the “Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock was never awarded an Oscar for his film direction, but he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1980.

See more portraits from this Sitting.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver died on this day, August 11, in 2009 (b. 1921). Shriver was the sister of President John F. Kennedy. She was a philanthropist, and she founded the Special Olympics in 1968. For her efforts on behalf of the disabled, Shriver was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 by US president Ronald Reagan. She was photographed with her husband, the American diplomat, politician, and activist Sargent Shriver.

General Omar Bradley was a senior officer of the United States Army during and after World War II. On August 11, 1949, President Harry S. Truman appointed Bradley the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1950, the first time he was photographed by Karsh, Bradley was promoted to the rank of General of the Army, the fifth – and last – person to achieve that rank. That same year, Bradley was made the first Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

Bradley was photographed by Karsh on three occasions – see the records.

America’s Smithsonian Institution was founded 175 years ago today, in 1846, with funds from the Englishman James Smithson (1765–1829), in accordance with his wishes: “under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” It is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, with 19 museums and the US National Zoo.

In 2013, Estrellita Karsh gifted to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery more than 100 portraits by Karsh, and the NPG celebrated this gift with their exhibition “Yousuf Karsh: American Portraits.” The exhibition featured “iconic photographs of Americans who have distinguished themselves in fields as diverse as business, medicine, entertainment, politics, and the arts. Among the portraits to be included will be those of artist Georgia O’Keeffe, physician and virologist Jonas Salk, singer Marian Anderson, actress Grace Kelly, businesswoman Elizabeth Arden, architect I.M. Pei, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. “Yousuf Karsh: American Portraits” will be the museum’s first exhibition devoted entirely to the work of this internationally recognized portrait photographer.” This exhibition went on to travel the US.

NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong was born on this day, August 5, in 1930. Armstrong was the commander of the 1969 US Apollo 11 Moon mission, and the first person to walk on the Moon. Along with Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon, and President Jimmy Carter presented Armstrong with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

The Summer 2021 issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, features an article about Eleanor Roosevelt’s writing career. Among other fascinating details, we learn that United Feature Syndicate, a distributor of newspaper columns, recruited First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1935 to write “My Day,” a column which she would go on to write six days a week from 1935 to 1962, only reducing the schedule from 1961-’62, the year in which she died. This Karsh portrait of her holding a pencil is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, (most recently included in the NPG’s exhibition “Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States“) and naturally the NEH turned to us to illustrate their article.

Read the whole article here.

“Announcing the retirement of Canada’s most famous typewriters.”

In 1985, Yousuf Karsh was assigned to photograph a group of creatives for “Apple Canada, Inc.”: Veronica Tennant, Charles Templeton, Peter C. Newman, Jack McClelland, Ben Wicks, Margaret Atwood, and Harold Town. McClelland was one of the founders of the Canadian publishing company McClelland & Stewart (now owned by Penguin Random House of Canada) and the copy reads “Twenty-five of the finest imaginations in Canadian literature, art and broadcasting have surrendered the traditional tools of their trade for Macintosh™️ personal computers. This historic event is only the beginning of a major commitment between the writers, editors and artists of McClelland & Stewart and the engineers, softwarer wizards and computer evangelists of Apple Canada, Inc.”

 

Fast-forward and Apple was the first U.S. company to reach $1 trillion in value, which it did three years ago today, on August 2, 2018. It took just two more years to get to $2 trillion.

It is worth taking a few minutes (or hours) to search the Library and Archives of Canada’s online collection for early Karsh images. With summer in full swing here in the Northern Hemisphere, I ran a search for “summer” and found a surprising series of photographs of Madame Lucia Beshro and her family, from the 1930s. In fact, as noted on the original Sitting records, the Beshros had ordered some prints in “Summer, 1939.”

 

President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, calling for the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces. This executive order abolished discrimination “on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin” in the United States Armed Forces.

Bob Hope died 18 years ago today. In 1959 and 1960, Karsh photographed more than a dozen public figures for TV Guide. They included Hope, a British-American stand-up comedian, vaudevillian, actor, singer, dancer, athlete and author. The others include Edward R. Murrow, Alfred Hitchcock, and Danny Kaye.

The results of the 1945 United Kingdom general election were declared on July 26, with Labor’s Clement Attlee winning a “landslide victory.” Although his predecessor, Winston Churchill, showed strong approval ratings, Labour had gradually gained support for months prior to the conclusion of the Second World War.

Attlee was photographed by Karsh four times, with the Sitter cards reading: 1941: “Right Honorable Clement Attlee MP”; 1943: “The Right Honorable Clement Attlee MP, Deputy Prime Minister”; 1945: “The Right Honorable Clement Attlee MP, For LIFE Magazine”; and 1949: “Prime Minister Clement Attlee, For Newsweek Magazine.” See more.

William Lyon Mackenzie King died on this day, July 22, in 1950 (b. 1874). King was Canada’s 10th Prime Minister and served from 1921-1930, and again from 1935-1948, during which he guided his country through the difficult times of World War II. He became the longest serving Prime Minister in Canadian history. As a friend, patron, and supporter of Karsh’s early years as a photographer, he played an important part in opening the doors of opportunity.

“Meeting him often, as a photographer and friend, perhaps I should have suspected the vast gulf between Mackenzie King’s public image and his private life. Through the Prime Minister’s patronage, I obtained some of my most important photographs, including a scowling Winston Churchill, in the darkest days of the second world war, which was the turning point of my career. But it was not until the embargo on his diaries and papers had been lifted that I, and the nation, began to see the secret garden of emotion, obsession, and even sheer fantasy that blossomed beneath a Calvinist exterior.”

See a photo of King chuckling with Churchill, on whom King had just played a little trick.

King has the highest number of Sitting records. See them all here.

New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist, Edmund Hillary was born on this day, July 20, in 1919.

On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest.

Among many other accolades, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in June, 1953, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year.

See more Karsh portraits of Sir Edmund.

It is worth noting that in some cases, Mr. Karsh was able to spend a good amount of time with his Sitters, which led to some intimate stories.

“When, in 1941, I spent two and a half days with the great Canadian humorist I had yet to realize that his fame had spread throughout the world. Perhaps that ignorance simplified my task. I photographed Leacock eating his breakfast; playing with Stevie, his son; fishing; listening to music; writing sixteen hundred words every morning; and, of course, laughing. He did not laugh, however (or so I thought), because he felt happy but because laughter was his profession. For he had not known much real happiness, especially in his domestic life.

Wit, a quality quite different from humour, constantly bubbled in his casual talk. One evening, for instance, he decided to take me fishing. Two craft were moored at his dock, a canoe and a motorboat. With my usual impatience I jumped into the motorboat. “No, no,” Leacock shouted. “We’re going out in the canoe. I’ll paddle.” When I asked him the reason for his choice, he answered: “Because the motorboat always gets there.”

After seeing a set of his portraits, he awarded me the Stephen Leacock Non-Existent Gold Medal and wrote his own captions for the photographs. They soon appeared in the Illustrated London News and many other publications. Most of them now hang in the library of Leacock’s house at Orillia, Ontario, which has been wisely preserved as a national shrine commemorating the wistful Englishman who brought his genius of humour to Canada.”

See more portraits of Stephen Leacock.

Mr. Karsh left us on this day, July 13, in 2002. Born in Mardin, Armenia, in 1908, his family fled to Syria in 1922; Karsh arrived in Canada in 1925, and he would be based there until 1997. Read his brief biography.

During his career he produced more than 15,000 Sittings, and as many as 370,000 negatives. His records begin in 1933, with an entry for April 25: “Dominion Drama Festival “Will Shakespeare” Nancy Barrow” and end in 1993, on May 6: “President & Mrs. Bill Clinton Photographed in the White House”.

This website and our social media are here to keep Mr. Karsh’s work in the public eye. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, would like to share a Karsh story, or to see if we have an image of a particular subject.

Canadian author Gabrielle Roy died on this day, July 13, in 1983 (b. 1909). Roy is considered by many to be one of the most important Francophone writers in Canadian history and one of the most influential Canadian authors.

The England football team lost the European Cup final to Italy this weekend. England has not won a major tournament since winning the World Cup in 1966, when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister – we just added this portrait of him to the website. See a portrait of Wilson from 1949 when he was President of the Board of Trade.

American businessman and politician Nelson Rockefeller was born on this day, July 8, in 1908 (d. 1979). His Sitting record, dated Mar 30, 1944, states his role as “Office Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Commerce Dept. Washington, D.C.”

Rockefeller served as the 41st vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford, from December 1974 to January 1977; he was previously the 49th governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. He also served as assistant secretary of State for American Republic Affairs for Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1944–1945) as well as under secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1954. A grandson of billionaire John D. Rockefeller and a member of the wealthy Rockefeller family, he was a noted art collector and served as administrator of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York City.

This portrait of the American former World No. 1 professional tennis player Billie Jean King is newly added to the database in honor of this year’s Wimbledon tournament. King turned professional in 1959 and only retired in 1990, during which time she won 39 Grand Slam titles: 12 in singles, 16 in women’s doubles, and 11 in mixed doubles.

A comment on Instagram light-heartedly asking whether Mr. Karsh had taken his own passport photograph reminded me of how many passport sittings Karsh did in the 1930s. Our colleagues at the Library and Archives, Canada, where Mr. Karsh’s negatives are held, digitize this early work. Here is Mr. Kaye Kneller whose pose would suggest this was a sitting for his passport.

See more of Karsh’s earliest work at the LAC.

The United States Supreme Court’s first African-American justice, Thurgood Marshall, was born on July 2, in 1908 (d. 1993). A lawyer and civil rights activist, he served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from October, 1967 until October, 1991.

See another portrait from this Sitting.

Dr. John P. Merrill (1917 – 1984) was an American physician and medical researcher. Dr. Merrill’s sitting reads: Director, Cardiorenal Section, Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Now known as Brigham and Women’s Hospital, this is where Dr. Merrill spent his career. He led the team which performed the world’s first successful kidney transplant and is generally credited as the “father of nephrology”, which is the scientific study of the kidney and its diseases. His portrait is freshly added to the website.

Canada Day is a federal statutory holiday which celebrates the anniversary of July 1, 1867, the effective date of the Constitution Act, 1867, which united the three separate colonies of the Province of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a single Dominion within the British Empire called Canada.

In 1947, Karsh became naturalized Canadian citizen number 10 and given a passport. The Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, invited one representative from each of the 10 provinces to receive the first passports, nominating Karsh as the representative from Ontario. In 1995 Karsh was invited to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Canadian passport; he was the only honoree still living. Thanks to North Country Public Radio we now have a full caption for this image of the first officially naturalized citizens of Canada after a ceremony at the Supreme Court of Canada building in Ottawa on January 3, 1947.

(Front row: l.-r.:) Naif Hanna Azar from Palestine, Jerzy Wladyslaw Meier from Poland, Louis Edmon Brodbeck from Switzerland, Joachim Heinrich Hellmen from Germany, Jacko Hrushkowsky from Russia, and Anton Justinik from Yugoslavia. (Back row: l.-r.:) Zigurd Larsen from Norway, Sgt. Maurice Labrosse from Canada, Joseph Litvinchuk, Roumania, Mrs. Labrosse from Scotland, Nestor Rakowitza from Roumania and Yousuf Karsh from Armenia with Mrs. Helen Sawicka from Poland.

Read Journalist Robert McGarvey’s article reflecting on “the enormous contribution of newcomers to Canada.” It is Karsh’s immigration story that McGarvey uses to make his point.

American engineer, inventor and science administrator, Vannevar Bush, died on this day, June 28, in 1974 (b. 1890).

During World War II, Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). He was photographed by Karsh in 1950, the year legislation to create the National Science Foundation passed through Congress and was signed into law by President Truman. The Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering; Bush was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to its creation.

Our friends at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama, re-installed the Karsh walk for their Juneteenth celebrations. “Voices of Change” includes ten Karsh portraits from the Museum’s permanent collection.

Join Montgomery artist Bill Ford for a personal journey reflecting on the subjects and their contributions to our shared humanity. Hear him talk about Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jessye Norman, Joan Baez, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Albert Schweitzer.

On June 24, in 1901, Pablo Picasso held his first major exhibition, “Yo Picasso” (I Picasso), at the Galerie Vollard in Paris.

Karsh wrote, “The maestro’s villa was a photographer’s nightmare, with his boisterous children bicycling through vast rooms already crowded with canvases. I eagerly accepted Picasso’s alternate suggestion to meet later in Vallauris at his ceramic gallery. ‘He will never be here,’ the gallery owner commented, when my assistant and two hundred pounds of equipment arrived…” Read the rest of the story, and see more photographs from this sitting.

Indonesia’s first President, Sukarno, died on this day, June 21, in 1970. He served as president from 1945 to 1967. Sukarno was the leader of the Indonesian struggle for independence from the Dutch colonialists.

Portugal’s star footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has overtaken France’s Michel Platini as the record goalscorer at the European Championships, having now scored 11 to Platini’s nine. Platini scored all of his nine goals for France’s winning team at the 1984 European Championships. Karsh photographed Platini the following year for Paris Match.

T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings was a British-born architect and furniture designer. Born Thomas Harry Robjohns Gibbings in 1903 (d. 1976), he sailed to the US in 1929 and again in 1930, when he took up residence in New York. In the late 1930s and 1940s he was the most important decorator in America. Read more (Wikipedia).

Robsjohn-Gibbings was photographed by Karsh in 1945 for House Beautiful. Karsh photographed several people for that magazine through the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, including other architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, and artists such as Lenore Tawney.

The American actress, singer and dancer Judy Garland was born on this day, June 10, in 1992 (d. 1969). Karsh photographed her for LIFE magazine in 1946.

Marguerite Yourcenar was a French novelist and essayist who was born in Brussels on this day, June 8, in 1903 (d. 1987). She was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour. Yourcenar was honored with multiple awards and was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980.

See some more portraits of Yourcenar by Karsh.

Karsh photographed a handful of his fellow photographers. Robert Capa was photographed in 1990 for Karsh’s “American Legends” series; he had previously been photographed in 1981. Like Karsh, Capa had intended to study medicine; instead he joined his brother, Robert Capa, in pursuing photography.

Other photographers who sat for Karsh include Harold Edgerton, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Ansel Adams, and Edward Steichen. In fact, Steichen was photographed on four occasions. See the Sitting info.

On June 3, 1937, former King Edward VIII married Wallis Simpson. Having ruled for less than one year, Edward VIII became the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne; he wished to marry a divorcée. This followed his abdication in December 1936, when the new King George VI announced he was to make his brother the “Duke of Windsor” with the style of Royal Highness.

The couple lived mainly in exile in Paris, France.