Yousuf Karsh, master photographer of the 20th century
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in 1935, and he was photographed on this day, March 23, in 1981. Delon is a French actor, film director, producer, screenwriter and singer, known as one of Europe’s most prominent actors and screen sex symbols from the 1960s and 1970s.
Alain Delon was photographed in 1981 for Paris Match, one of around 20 people Karsh photographed for that magazine in the ’80s. See a list.
French actor and mime artist Marcel Marceau was born on March 22, 1923, making this the centenary of his birth. He was photographed by Karsh in 1956, during Marceau’s first tour of Canada and the United States.
We have added a couple more Karsh portraits of Marcel Marceau to the website to celebrate.
“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” Karsh’s portrait of former First Lady and first U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Eleanor Roosevelt, and her quote, are being used in this on-air underwriting spot for Rocky Mountain Public Media.
An inquiry came in about this photograph of Joanna and Edward Steichen rowing near their home in Connecticut in 1967, so we added it to the website. Karsh photographed “Commander Edward Steichen” in 1944; “Edward Steichen” in 1965; “Mr. & Mrs. Edward Steichen” in 1967, and “Edward Steichen. Photographed with his beagle dog “Tripod”” in 1970.
In Karsh: Beyond the Camera David Travis wrote that Karsh was commissioned to photograph Steichen during the Second World War, when Steichen was a naval commander. “The prospect of photographing such a giant was awesome. I was so tense and nervous that the first unsatisfactory result made me timorously request a second sitting, to which a patient and understanding Steichen acquiesced.”
“Karsh believed that no photographer was more talented, creative or influential than Edward Steichen. “It was like necessary food to turn his pages in Vanity Fair for inspiration.” Karsh first met Steichen in 1936 during a visit to New York City…. Karsh’s first portrait of Steichen was taken years later in Washington, D.C. while Steichen was serving his country again in another world war. They became closer in the mid-1960s. By this time, Steichen had suffered two strokes and married his third wife, a woman fifty-five years his junior. He had retired to Umpawaug, his Connecticut house and acreage where the Karshs were invited as house guests.”
German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was born on March 14, in 1879 (d. 1955). Einstein is known widely for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics.
Of their Sitting in 1948, Karsh wrote, “At Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, I found Einstein a simple, kindly, almost childlike man, too great for any of the postures of eminence. One did not have to understand his science to feel the power of his mind or the force of his personality. He spoke sadly, yet serenely, as one who had looked into the universe, far past mankind’s small affairs. When I asked him what the world would be like were another atomic bomb to be dropped, he replied wearily, ‘Alas, we will no longer be able to hear the music of Mozart.’”
Just added to the website, an at-rest Dr. Jonas Salk in a portrait from his Sitting with Karsh in 1956. Dr. Salk was photographed at the University of Pittsburgh, Municipal Hospital. See more images of Jonas Salk.
Helen Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. She was photographed on this day, March 8, in 1948. Keller was photographed alone and with Miss Polly Thomson, her companion, at the Hotel Algonquin in New York, for Coronet Magazine.
Today marks the centenary of the birth of photographer Herman Leonard (March 6, 1923; d. 2010.) Leonard gained a BFA degree in photography in 1947 from Ohio University, although his college career was interrupted by a tour of duty in the United States Army during World War II. After graduation, he apprenticed with Yousuf Karsh for one year assisting for sitters such as Albert Einstein, Harry Truman, and Martha Graham.
In 1948, Leonard opened his first studio in New York’s Greenwich Village. Working freelance for various magazines, he spent his evenings at the Royal Roost and then Birdland, where he photographed jazz musicians such as Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and others. Read more (Wikipedia).
Kurt Weill was born on this day, March 2, in 1900 (d. 1950). The German-born American composer was active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht with whom he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad “Mack the Knife.”
Thomas Clark (1899-1977) was an American lawyer who served as the 59th United States Attorney General from 1945 to 1949 and as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1949 to 1967. He was photographed on this day, February 17, in 1963.
Irish national television and radio broadcaster RTÉ has an interview with Yousuf Karsh available in their online archives. It is an episode of their program ‘Broadsheet’ which was originally broadcast on June 5, 1963. “The Armenian-Canadian Yousuf Karsh talks about the art of portrait photographer.”
“Yousuf Karsh has photographed royalty, popes, world leaders, actors, writers and artists. On a one day visit to Ireland he explains how he approaches his subjects… On the subject of preparation, Yousuf Karsh prepares as much as he can prior to meeting the person he will photograph, researching and reading about them. In the case of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, he listened to his music. So when he meets them, he feels as if he already knows them.”
I’m not a total stranger, and at once there is something tangible that brings a rapport, brings an immediate meeting of minds.
I try to photograph all that the person stands for… that is very difficult to explain. But if I can combine many moods into one photograph, consummation of what that personality stands for, then I have accomplished my aim.
Watch the whole interview (7 mins).
American actor Kim Novak is 90 years young today, February 13. She is pictured here in costume for the 1964 movie “Of Human Bondage,” which is based on W. Somerset Maugham‘s 1915 novel of the same title. Novak has spent the latter part of her life as an artist and activist.
There is a wonderful Instagram page, Photographers Photographed, devoted to portraits of photographers by photographers, which prompted me to think about all the photographers and photo-related inventors who sat for Karsh. Edwin Land is best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. He invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and the retinex theory of color vision, among other things. His Polaroid instant camera went on sale in late 1948 and made it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less.
In the early years of the Cold War, Land played a major role in the development of photographic reconnaissance and intelligence gathering efforts.
In his laboratory he built giant studio cameras the size of bedroom closets that produced large format, 20 x 24 inch, prints. He gave photographers free access to these cameras in return for some of the prints they produced. Read more (Wikipedia).
On February 6, in 1952, Britain’s King George VI died and his eldest daughter Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II. Both were photographed by Karsh in 1943, when Elizabeth was just 18, and Her Royal Highness would go on to sit for Mr. Karsh on four more occasions over the next 44 years: 1951, 1966, 1984, and 1987. See some more photographs here.
Russian-American violinist Jascha Heifetz was born on February 2, in 1901. Born in Vilna (Vilnius), he moved as a teenager to the United States, where his Carnegie Hall debut was rapturously received. He was a virtuoso since childhood – Fritz Kreisler, another leading violinist of the twentieth century, said on hearing Heifetz’s debut, “We might as well take our fiddles and break them across our knees.”
Late in life, Heifetz became a dedicated teacher and a champion of socio-political causes. He publicly advocated to establish 911 as an emergency phone number, and crusaded for clean air. He and his students at the University of Southern California protested smog by wearing gas masks, and in 1967, he converted his Renault passenger car into an electric vehicle. He died in 1987. Read more (Wikipedia).
Jackie Robinson was born on this day, January 31, in 1919 (d.1972). Robinson is legendary in the United States for being the first African American to play in Major League Baseball. Karsh photographed Robinson in 1957, the year after Robinson had retired from the game.
Robinson also was the first black television analyst in Major League Baseball and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o’Nuts. In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on this day, January 30, in 1882 (d. 1945). He was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first American President to pay an official visit to the Dominion of Canada. There to greet him and his son James Roosevelt were: Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada; Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King; and, a great deal of International press.
“This photograph was made on the terrace of the Citadel at Quebec overlooking the St. Lawrence and the Beaufort Shore where Wolfe unsuccessfully assaulted the entrenched forces of Montcalm. Earlier in the afternoon, there had been a roundup of notables for the news photographers, when fifty or more cameramen engaged in another formidable assault by flashlight bulbs. I was unable to take part in the melee with my equipment, and, after the gathering broke up, bemoaned my bad luck to the Comptroller of the Household, an old friend. He significantly suggested that I stick around.
Later in the afternoon President Roosevelt appeared with his son James, Lord Tweedsmuir and the Canadian Prime Minister. They had come out for a breath of air and were quite willing to be photographed again. They proceeded rather self-consciously, standing stiffly erect, side-by-side, like soldiers at attention. I pretended to click the shutter and said, “Thank you, very much.” The ordeal over, Tweedsmuir began to tell one of his Scottish stories and everyone relaxed. This time I did click the shutter.”
An inquiry about Marshall McLuhan led to the addition to the website of this image from his 1967 sitting. Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan coined the expression “the medium is the message” in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and the term “global village.” And he predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. Read more (Wikipedia).
Corazon Aquino was a Filipino politician who served as the 11th president of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992. She was the most prominent figure of the 1986 People Power Revolution, which ended the two-decade rule of President Ferdinand Marcos and led to the establishment of the current democratic Fifth Philippine Republic. She was born on this day, January 25, in 1933 (d. 2009).
Another image added to the website. Rudolph Carl Gorman (1931-2005) was a Native American artist of the Navajo Nation. Referred to as “the Picasso of American Indian artists” by The New York Times, his paintings are primarily of Native American women and characterized by fluid forms and vibrant colors, though he also worked in sculpture, ceramics, and stone lithography. His father, Carl, was one of the original twenty-nine Navajo Code Talkers, who, along with his colleagues, developed the unbreakable code American forces used in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Read more (Wikipedia).
American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator Samuel Barber died on this day, January 23, in 1981 (b. 1910). He is considered one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century. Twice the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Barber wrote compositions such as “Adagio for Strings” that remain in the concert repertoires of orchestras around the world.
Barber was in a relationship with Italian composer, librettist, director, and playwright Gian Carlo Menotti for more than 40 years; they were both photographed by Karsh on March 11, 1956.
Indira Gandhi became the 4th Prime Minister of India on this day, January 19, in 1966. She served from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984.
Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. Before her election as PM, she was a central figure of the Indian National Congress party. Read more (Wikipedia)
Estrellita Karsh celebrates her birthday today, January 19. Estrellita was a successful medical writer and historian when she met Yousuf Karsh in 1961. Karsh wrote:
“It was a congenial medical office – one that always made me think of my original desire to be a physician – which provided the setting for Estrellita Nachbar, the gifted medical writer and historian who was to become my wife. I was in Chicago photographing her employer and mentor, one of America’s most distinguished physicians, Dr. Walter C. Alvarez. He was then bringing to millions of readers, through his syndicated column, the reassuring clinical wisdom and compassion that had made him a beloved and world-famous diagnostician at the Mayo Clinic. Estrellita had been Dr. Alvarez’s editor for some years, using her extensive literary and medical background to make difficult scientific concepts exciting and readable to the layman, and collaborating with the doctor on his current best sellers. As Newsweek whimsically put it when reporting our marriage in 1962, “Something else clicked beside the shutter.” With our marriage, at which Dr. Alvarez gave away the bride, we blended our worlds, each adding a new dimension to the other. With her editorial ability Estrellita helped me to formulate my thoughts. She also brought her organizational skills to planning trips and schedules so that work was always complemented by new discoveries. On all our travels over the years – whether to Zululand, to Japan, to Russia, to Finland, to Scandinavia, to Egypt – we have pursued our joint interests in archaeology, in art, in medicine. She has continued to write articles on medical history. I have often sat in the audience at her lectures, when her carefully concealed scholarship transforms research in old tomes into engaging and modern social history.”
Read more in our Brief Biography.
See the portrait of Dr. Alvarez.
See Yousuf and Estrellita Karsh’s wedding at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Gina Lollobrigida was one of the highest-profile European actresses of the 1950s and early 1960s. She turned to photojournalism in the 1970s, and, later, to politics. Active in multiple causes, in 2013 she sold her jewelry collection, and donated the nearly $5 million from the sale to benefit stem-cell therapy research.
Karen Magnussen is a Canadian former competitive figure skater. She is the 1972 Olympic silver medallist and 1973 World champion. She was Canada’s Female Athlete of the Year in 1971 and 1972, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1973, the year in which she was photographed by Karsh. Her portrait has just been added to this website.
The Swedish actress Anita Ekberg died on this day, January 11, in 2015 (b. 1931). Karsh wrote of their Sitting: “The smorgasbord was already lavishly spread on the table of Anita Ekberg’s California home when I arrived. Her natural behavior resembled the love goddesses she portrayed – uninhibited and seductive and totally without guile. When changing from one gown to another, she ignored the screen her attendant had placed before her.”
Just added to the website is this informal photograph of German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It joins three other, more formal portraits in the digital database. See them here.
In the 1930s, Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus, a ground-breaking school of modernist art, design and architecture. After Nazism’s rise to power, with its strong opposition to modernism (leading to the closing of the Bauhaus itself), Mies emigrated to the United States. Read more (Wikipedia).
Joan Baez was born on this day, January 9, in 1941. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums. She was photographed by Karsh in 1970, for Look magazine’s “Under 30” series, and again in 1979 for CBS records.
Tickets are now available for the Decorative Arts Trust 7th Annual Colloquium featuring young scholars in the decorative arts field.
Christina L. De León will present the lecture “Reinterpreting an American Chair: Clara Porset and Josef Albers’ Butaca,” on January 22, 2023. Tickets are available here.
The Campeche, or butaca, as it is called in Spanish, is a reclining, non-folding, sling-seat chair with a distinctive side-placed curule base as modeled here by Josef Albers.
De León is Associate Curator of Latino Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. Since joining the institution in 2017, she has actively worked to build the museum’s collection of US Latino and Latin American design from the 18th century to the present, while also organizing exhibitions and public programs that highlight designers from the Americas. De León is currently a doctoral candidate at the Bard Graduate Center, where her research focuses on the material culture and decorative arts of the Americas. Her dissertation, “Mapping an American Chair Form: The History and Evolution of the Butaca,” charts the transformation of this seating type from the 11th to the mid-20th century and explores how the butaca emerged as a chair form distinctly of the Americas. In 2020, De León received a Decorative Arts Trust Research Grant for her studies.
Clement Attlee was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was Deputy Prime Minister during the wartime coalition government under Winston Churchill, and served twice as Leader of the Opposition from 1935 to 1940 and from 1951 to 1955. He was born on this day, January 3, in 1883 (d. 1967).
Attlee remains the longest serving Labour leader. 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.
American broadcast journalist Barbara Walters has died. Walters became the first female network news anchor in 1974, when she was promoted from segment producer to co-host of The Today Show, NBC’s morning news program. Walters was photographed by Karsh at her apartment in New York, for Harper’s Bazaar.
American author John Steinbeck died on this day, December 20, in 1968 (b. 1902). “A giant of American letters,” Steinbeck was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
Wishing all our friends and followers in the Northern Hemisphere a safe and healthy winter. According to the caption for this image, pictured is “the only steam bath of its kind at Lakehead – a genuine Finnish sauna where clouds of steam are produced by ice water being poured over hot rocks.”
American abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler was born on this day, December 12, in 1928 (d. 2011). She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting, having exhibited her work for over six decades.
Hans Hartung died on this day, December 7, in 1989. He was a German-French painter, known for his gestural abstract style. Born in Germany in 1904, Hartung moved to Paris in the late 1920s, and was a decorated World War II veteran of the French Foreign Legion.
The South African anti-apartheid activist who served as the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 died on this day, December 5, in 2013. Mandela was photographed by Karsh in June, 1990, just four months after Mandela’s release from prison. Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada at the time, greeted Mandela at the airport and accompanied him to the Chateau Laurier for his portrait. Read what happened.
American businessman and Republican Party politician George Romney was photographed on this day, December 1, in 1965. He was photographed during his tenure as Governor of Michigan, and Karsh’s Sitting notes say he was photographed for “Rockwell Standard and American Trucking Assn.” Rockwell was a major American manufacturing conglomerate involved in aircraft, the space industry, defense and commercial electronics, components in the automotive industry, printing presses, avionics and industrial products.
Karsh photographed several people for Rockwell Standard – see the other Sitters here.
November 26, 2022, marks the centenary of the birth of Charles Schulz. He was born in Minneapolis in 1922 (d. 2000), he became widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists in history. Schulz is especially beloved for Peanuts, which at its height was published daily in 2,600 papers in 75 countries, in 21 languages. During the strip’s run, Schulz took only one vacation, a five-week break in late 1997 to celebrate his 75th birthday; reruns of the strip ran, the only time that occurred during Schulz’s life. Read more (Wikipedia)
In Karsh’s book American Legends (Bullfinch Press, 1992) Karsh wrote of the artist “He presented me with America’s favorite beagle, a tiny velvet “Snoopy,” as a gift to my wife, and it remains among her favorite sentimental treasures.”
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas.
An update on the 1917 Halifax Explosion. A new eight minute animation about the disaster called “The Flying Sailor,” from Oscar-nominated directors Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, and via the National Film Board of Canada, has been released on The New Yorker’s video channel.
A relative of Miss A. Edith Fenton (1893-1974) recently shared her portrait, and her fascinating story. Mr. Fenton told us: “For her work as a nurse in Halifax, including during the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion in 1917 (still the largest conventional weapon explosion in history) that wiped out a portion of the city, and as head of nursing for St. John Ambulance in Canada, she received the King’s Silver Jubilee Medal in 1935, the MBE in 1942, and in 1947 the King made her a member of the Royal Order of St. John.”
Our respect goes to Mr. Fenton working to maintain his great aunt’s legacy.