Yousuf Karsh, master photographer of the 20th century
Jackie Robinson, who was the first African-American to play in US major league baseball, died on this day, October 24, in 1972. Robinson broke the baseball color line when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.
Born a century ago in 1919, he died of a heart attack at just 53 years old.
The Guggenheim Museum opened on October 21 in 1959, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. It adopted its current name after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1952.
In 1959, the museum moved to its current building, a landmark work of 20th-century architecture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The cylindrical building is wider at the top than at the bottom and was conceived as a “temple of the spirit”.
Eleanor Roosevelt was born on this day, October 11, in 1884. She served as the First Lady of the United States from March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s four terms in office, making her the longest-serving.
Following her husband’s death in 1945, Roosevelt remained active in politics for the remaining 17 years of her life. She pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations and became its first delegate. She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Read more (Wikipedia)
This glorious portrait is used in promotional materials by the US National Park Service at the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York.
October 5th marks the anniversary of Earl Warren’s swearing-in as the 14th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1953. He would sit until 1969.
The “Warren Court” presided over a major shift in American constitutional jurisprudence, with Warren writing the majority opinions in landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Reynolds v. Sims (1964), Miranda v. Arizona (1966) and Loving v. Virginia (1967).
He is, as of 2019, the last Chief Justice to have served in an elected office before entering the Supreme Court, and is generally considered to be one of the most influential Supreme Court justices and political leaders in the history of United States. Read more (Wikipedia).
In 1964, Macmillan published The Warren Court with photographs by Yousuf Karsh, and text by John P. Frank, an American lawyer and scholar involved in landmark civil rights, school desegregation, and criminal procedure cases before the United States Supreme Court.
Charlton Heston was born on this day, October 4, in 1923. He was photographed by Karsh in 1956 during filming of “The Ten Commandments”, both in-costume, and behind-the-scenes with his son, Fraser (who is himself a film director, producer, screenwriter and actor).
American soprano Jessye Norman has died. Ms. Norman won four Grammy Awards for her recordings, as well as a lifetime achievement award, and was granted the National Medal of Arts in 2009.
60 Minutes debuted on American television in September, 1968. One of America’s most beloved news programs still broadcasts on CBS, where correspondent Morley Safer worked for 50 years. He filed more than 900 stories during his tenure.
Watch this delightful video in which Mr. Karsh explains to Morley Safer the conditions under which Karsh made his most famous portrait of all, Winston Churchill, in its original location at the Chambers of the Canadian House of Parliament.
Jacques Chirac, former French president, has died. M. Chirac was elected to two consecutive terms as president, beginning in 1995, having already served as prime minister. Karsh photographed Chirac in 1981 for Paris Match.
The creative genius Jim Henson was born on this day, September 24, in 1936. Henson died before his time, not long after he sat with Mr. Karsh for this shining portrait, a photograph beloved by Mr. Henson’s family. And as you can see, Mr. Karsh loved Kermit as much as the rest of us.
A print of this portrait was most recently included in the traveling exhibition “Yousuf Karsh: American Portraits.”
New to the digital archives is this beautiful scan of the one and only Harold Prince. We honored Mr. Prince in a previous post when we heard the sad news of his passing. We are happy to be adding to the archives on a regular basis. If you are looking for a particular subject, use the Sittings search and then drop us a line.
Actress and singer Sophia Loren was born on this day, September 20, in 1934.
Sophia Loren won an Academy Award for “Two Women” in 1960, and she has won a Grammy Award, five special Golden Globes, a BAFTA Award, a Laurel Award, the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival and the Honorary Academy Award in 1991. In 1995, she received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievements, one of many such awards. In 1999, Loren was named by the American Film Institute the 21st greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema, and she is currently the only living actress on the list. Read more (Wikipedia)
See more photographs from the sitting, including one of Ms. Loren’s personal favorites of herself with her son, Edoardo.
The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, out now from Vintage Books. Set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel traces the continued evolution of Atwood’s totalitarian state of Gilead, where women are reduced to their wombs and justification is found in the Bible for every abuse of power.
Karsh photographed Atwood in 1977 to be included in Karsh: Canadians, University of Toronto Press, 1978.
“Reflection: 180 Years in Photography” opened in August at The Ellen Noel Art Museum in Odessa, Texas. The exhibition is guest curated by Odessa College Photography Professor and President of the Texas Photographic Society, Steve Goff, who included two original photographs by Yousuf Karsh: George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Hemingway.
“Photography can be seen as a combination of science and art, in which advances in technique that continually feed creativity and artistic achievement. This exhibition represents a survey of photography with works by renowned masters along with examples of the evolution of personal photography.” The show runs until November 24, 2019. Visit Noel Art Museum website for more details.
The Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York is pleased to announce “Pierre Soulages: A Century”, an exhibition celebrating the 100th birthday of France’s foremost living artist through a presentation of works spanning his career from the 1950s to today. On view from September 5 through October 26, 2019, this focused survey explores the artist’s enduring role in the dialogue between European and American painting and invites viewers to consider the impact of a practice that has injected profound poetry into radical abstraction through its adherence to a single material: black paint.
Yousuf Karsh photographed Pierre Soulages in France in April, 1965. Other artists who were photographed in France that month include Jean-Paul Riopelle and Ossip Zadkine.
These two characters co-hosted a workshop in Yosemite in 1977, and thanks to social media, we heard a new tale from the event. Photographer Gary Faye attended four of Adams’ workshops. He told us:
Ansel invited excellent instructors from specialties other than landscape. Karsh was one of those greats.
The class format was a series of seminars with conversational breaks and field practice sessions. I was fortunate to be present at several personal moments. One of these was a portrait session with Ansel and Karsh. This was a short break, Polaroid at the ready while a Karsh assistant acted as a human light stand providing illumination. I just happened to be in a good spot with a camera. I only made one frame, not wanting to intrude.
Karsh and Ansel were strolling in a field with light banter and Karsh suggested Ansel had an unfair advantage/alliance with the gods whereby dramatic weather would appear whenever desired.
At that exact moment there was a loud thunderclap whereby Ansel extended his hands as acceptance of the celestial gift and Karsh laughing, clapped his hands enthusiastically.
The Estate is also in touch with Karsh’s assistant at the time, Alan Ross. Some of Alan’s photographs from this same workshop are below.
And finally, the set up for Karsh’s portrait of Adams – you can see Karsh’s choices here.
“The Roaring Lion” is launching this month from The Royal Canadian Mint. This limited edition collectible is the third coin that features an image by Karsh and as usual the product is spectacular.
The coin features a reproduction of Yousuf Karsh’s portrait of Churchill, known as “The Roaring Lion” after Churchill’s comment to Karsh “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed!”
Our director, Mr. Fielder and Mrs. Karsh joined our colleagues at the Mint for a private tour earlier this year. See the Mint’s blog post about their visit.
See the Princess Elizabeth coin.
Watch Karsh recreate the Churchill portrait.
The paperback version of Andrew Roberts’ Churchill biography “Walking With Destiny” is out now from Penguin Random House featuring Karsh’s most famous portrait on the cover, and also on the spine.
“Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill… A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain’s savior.” – Wall Street Journal
In honor of the upcoming Labor Day holiday in the US, we present John L. Lewis. Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960. A major player in the history of coal mining, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s.
After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, he took the Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942 and in 1944, the year that he was photographed by Karsh, he took the union into the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Read more (Wikipedia)
Fifty-six years ago, in August, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Karsh noted: “In August 1962 I was asked to hurry down to Atlanta, Georgia, to photograph the Reverend Martin Luther King for a national publication. He had just returned home from nearby Albany, where for months he had been leading the most concentrated and sustained assault on segregation seen till then in the South… No man in America personified better than Martin Luther King the dedication of his people to their inalienable rights.” Read more.
In 1938 Karsh photographed founding members of the C.C.F, The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Founded in 1932, it was a social-democratic and democratic socialist political party in Canada, and was succeeded by today’s New Democratic Party when the C.C.F. merged with the Canadian Labour Congress. Thanks go to our colleagues at the Library and Archives Canada for recently digitizing this photograph.
Mr. Karsh’s card file records begin in 1933, and he maintained a card for each sitting from 1933 to 1993, each of which has been transcribed and is searchable on this website.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, known as Mother Teresa, was born on this day, August 26, in 1910. She began working in the slums of Calcutta in India in 1948 and went on to found the Missionaries of Charity, orphanages, hospitals and hospices dedicated to the sick and the poor. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
All of Karsh’s more than 15,000 sittings were recorded on individual card files, and the data on those cards is searchable on this website. The “Sitter Card” for Mother Teresa reads: Photographed during visit to Ottawa at Chapel, Archdiocese of Ottawa Archbishop’s Residence.
See other Nobel Prize winners who were photographed by Karsh.
American theatrical producer and director Harold “Hal” Prince died last month. Prince is associated with many of the best-known Broadway musical productions of the 20th century.
Over the span of his career, he garnered 21 Tony Awards, more than any other individual, including eight for directing, eight for producing the year’s Best Musical, two as Best Producer of a Musical, and three special awards.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, hosted a lecture with Mr. Prince in 2012, where he met with Mrs. Karsh and posed with a Karsh portrait of himself from 1989.
Comedian, actor, singer, filmmaker and humanitarian, Jerry Lewis, died on this day, August 20, in 2017. He was 91. Karsh photographed Lewis in 1974 for Lewis’s Muscular Dystrophy annual Labor Day telethon. Karsh was introduced to the Muscular Dystrophy Association by his wife, Estrellita, who, as a medical writer, had written about the disease. Karsh would go on to photograph the annual poster for the Muscular Dystrophy Association for more than 20 years. Read more.
The 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton, was born on this day, August 19, in 1946. By his own account, Clinton was inspired to enter politics after meeting President John F. Kennedy at the White House when Clinton was a high school student.
Karsh had closed his studio in Ottawa in 1992, aged 84, but in 1993 he traveled to the White House to photograph the new president and new First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in 1993. And Clinton installed Karsh’s “Roaring Lion” Churchill portrait when he moved into his new residence.
See the portraits of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and the two together.
Banksy’s Turf War reproduces Karsh’s famous portrait of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a slight difference; instead of a bald head, Churchill is painted with a green mohican.
Banksy reimagines Winston Churchill as a punk rocker with a bright green strip of hair resembling a mohawk but also a piece of turf. Painted in Banksy’s typical black and white stencil style on a white background, the portrait is monochromatic, like Karsh’s original photograph, apart from the green strip of hair. Churchill shows the same determined smile and ferocious look as in Karsh’s photograph, which earned him the nicknames ‘the British bulldog’ and ‘the roaring lion’ and which perfectly reflect his famous words ‘We shall never surrender’. MyArtBroker
On August 15, in 1947, India and Pakistan gained their independence after 200 years of British rule.
Karsh photographed India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1956 while Nehru was still in office. He photographed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto during Bhutto’s tenure as the ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan, and he would go on to photograph his daughter Benazir Bhutto, the 11th and 13th Prime Minister of Pakistan, in 1989.
Strikes that took place in Poland on August 14, 1980, would lead to Solidarność.
With his history of organizing workers to strike against the government, another rise in food prices led to a strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. It inspired other similar strikes in Gdańsk, which then spread across Poland, and ultimately led to Walesa being chosen as chairman of the National Coordinating Committee of the Solidarność (Solidarity) Free Trade Union. Read more (Wikipedia)
Lech Walesa was photographed by Yousuf Karsh in 1989, at Government House in Ottawa.
Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899. He was photographed for TV Guide in 1960 – the year of 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.
Fulton J. Sheen was an American bishop (later archbishop) of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio – even twice winning an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality.
The cause for Sheen’s canonization was officially opened in 2002. In June 2012, Pope Benedict XVI officially recognized a decree from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints stating that he lived a life of “heroic virtues” – a major step towards beatification – and he is now referred to as “Venerable.” In July, 2019, Pope Francis approved a miracle that occurred through the intercession of Archbishop Sheen, clearing the way for his beatification.
Thanks to the Internet and to social media, the Estate receives regular inquiries from a variety of people and organizations. This week we were asked if we could confirm whether a color portrait of Vannevar Bush was indeed made by Mr. Karsh. Our colleagues at the National Archives of Canada will search their Karsh fonds and share what they find.
Vannevar Bush, an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 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.
On August 6, in 1965, US President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote. The bill made it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections that were designed to deny the vote to blacks.
In 2013, the US Supreme Court essentially gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination at the polls to clear their voting changes with the federal government before those changes went into effect. Since the general election in 2016, 17 million Americans have had their voter registration canceled.
The United States dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Karsh photographed Robert Oppenheimer, known as one of the “fathers of the atomic bomb” later, in 1956, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. By this time, “Increasingly concerned about the potential danger to humanity arising from scientific discoveries, Oppenheimer joined with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually become the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960.” (Wikipedia)
Karsh naturally photographed several of the other prominent people involved, including “father of the hydrogen bomb” Dr. Edward Teller.
Ottawa City Council established the Karsh Award in 2003 to honor the enduring legacy of Yousuf and his photographer brother Malak Karsh. Every four years, a $7,500 prize is presented to a mid-career local Ottawa artist for their outstanding body of work and significant contribution to the artistic discipline in a photo/lens-based medium. Over the subsequent three-year period, the laureate is also invited to hold an exhibition of his/her work at the Karsh-Masson Gallery, located in Ottawa’s City Hall, mentor within the local artistic community and participate in the 2022 Karsh Continuum exhibition which will highlight and celebrate the future of artistic photographic achievement in Ottawa.
The City of Ottawa is pleased to announce that local artist Andrew Wright is the winner of the 2019 Karsh Award. The peer assessment committee selected Mr. Wright from an impressive list of nominated artists. The jury was comprised of Lori Pauli the Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, Michael Schreier the 2016 Karsh Award laureate and Franco-Ontarian photographer Geneviève Thauvette.
An Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Acting Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa, Mr. Wright has been involved with many local community and cultural groups since moving to Ottawa in 2008. In 2011, he won the Gattuso Prize at the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto. Mr. Wright’s work has been shown worldwide, including at London Gallery West, Today Art Museum in Beijing, the former Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver and the Ottawa Art Gallery. His work is featured in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian High Commission in London and the Xi’an Art Museum in China.
The Karsh-Masson Gallery will host his exhibit from January 23 to March 15, 2020.
Neil Armstrong took many photographs while on the surface of the moon, including this image of his famous footstep. He later gave this print to Mr. Karsh to thank him for a portrait session. The print is signed by the astronaut and inscribed: “That’s one small step for a man – one giant leap for mankind. To Yousuf & Estrellita – with the admiration and best wishes of the photographer.”
Bernard Madoff has made an application for clemency in the hope of reducing his 150 year sentence he received for his Ponzi scheme. In 1988, Mrs. Madoff gifted a portrait sitting with Mr. Karsh to her husband. Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 crimes in 2009 and we rediscovered the images when Vanity Fair magazine called to ask about licensing them alongside an interview they were doing with Madoff’s long term secretary.
With more than 15,000 sittings on record, we still turn up surprises!
On July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that claims of executive privilege over the “Watergate” tapes were void. The Court ordered the President to release the tapes to the special prosecutor. On July 30, 1974, Nixon complied with the order and released the subpoenaed tapes to the public.
Karsh photographed Nixon on January 3, 1969 when Nixon was President-Elect. Nixon was photographed on three previous occasions – see those Sittings.
Photographer Berenice Abbott was born on this day, July 17, in 1898. Abbott is widely revered for her photographs of New York City architecture of the 1930s, and scientific imagery from the 1940s to 1960s – an example of which can be seen behind her in this portrait.
Karsh photographed Abbott at her home in Maine in 1989. He spoke at her funeral in 1991, and you can listen to a recording here.
Abbott’s fascinating life is explored in Julia Van Haaften’s biography Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (WW Norton, 2018). Read more about the book.
Apollo 11 was launched by a Saturn V rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, on July 16, 1969, and the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. Karsh photographed the crew, Michael Collins, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong, in September of that year.
Karsh photographed the three Apollo 8 astronauts, William Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, in April, 1969. Anders took the beloved “Earthrise” photograph on that mission. Read more.
Six years prior, Karsh had a sitting with Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, who was photographed during Karsh’s trip to the USSR. Read more.
In July of 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His main rival was New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Goldwater was photographed in 1963 when he was senator for Arizona.
Goldwater was viewed by many traditional Republicans as being too far on the right wing of the political spectrum to appeal to the mainstream majority necessary to win a national election and he lost to Lyndon Johnson by a landslide.
Boris Yeltsin became the first President of the Russian Federation on this day, July 10, in 1991. He would lead from 1991 to 1999, when he resigned and was succeeded by his chosen successor, former Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.