Portrait in Light and Shadow: The Life of Yousuf Karsh
by Maria Tippett
Reviewed by Lynne Truss
The Sunday Times
February 10, 2008
In December 1941 (so the story goes), Winston Churchill delivered a
landmark speech to the Canadian parliament, and afterwards discovered ‘
to his annoyance ‘ that he was to have his picture taken in an
adjoining chamber by a small, delicate Armenian man whose excessively
good manners turned out to mask a steely resolve. That man would later
be known to the world as `Karsh of Ottawa’ and this year is his
centenary. Anyway, Churchill immediately lit a cigar and ignored the
ashtray Karsh politely offered. At which point, under severe pressure
of time, Karsh simply removed Churchill’s cigar from his lips and took
the iconic portrait that resulted, in which a look of sheer, murderous
outrage is combined with a babyish sulk.
That picture made Karsh’s name. By miraculous good fortune (and,
really, what were the chances?), Churchill’s glowering
you-thieving-little-bastard expression looked exactly like `We shall
never surrender.’ No wonder Karsh loved this self-glorifying story so
much that he retold it for the rest of his life. The picture became
celebrated universally as The Roaring Lion, and the amazing thing is:
even when viewers knew the cigar story, they still succumbed to its
power.
Turn to the life of virtually any male 20th-century notable, and you
will probably find that he was successfully `Karshed’ at some point or
another. For anyone with an eye to posterity ‘ politicians, film stars,
world leaders, royals ‘ Karshing was virtually a career requirement.
And why? Well, one of the main reasons was that nobody ever looked at a
Karsh and said, `I wonder if anyone famous took that.’ Any flattering
and meticulously printed monochrome studio picture of a Top Person
characterised by extreme and artful contrast, a studied pose,
theatrical highlights, pinpoint detail, visible hands and optional
silvery cigarette smoke can be rightly assumed to be his. And if
Karsh’s was an old-fashioned and restricted approach to photography, by
the way, he certainly made a virtue of that fact ‘ just as he turned so
many other drawbacks into advantages, as Maria Tippett’s biography
reveals. Take the Ottawa thing alone. Imagine what appalling luck it
was for an ambitious, immigrant, lion-hunting photographer to find
himself based in the administrative capital of Canada. Lesser men would
have given up at once and sold pencils. Yet, by branding himself Karsh
of Ottawa, our hero cleverly conferred worldwide cachet on an
unglamorous city (thus earning its gratitude) and made himself sound
much more interesting and exotic at the same time.
Portrait in Light and Shadow is a somewhat optimistic title for this
biography. It implies there will be ups and downs and a bit of probing
into dark corners. In fact, it appears that even any light-and-shade
account of Karsh’s long life (he died in 2002, aged 93) was made pretty
well impossible by the way he took ownership of his story, and
presented it in the best possible light. Every conversation with a
famous sitter was typed up afterwards by his first wife Solange; each
encounter (with Sibelius, or Elizabeth Taylor, or Khrushchev) was
reduced to a polished, anodyne caption. One starts to feel sorry for a
biographer faced with such an airbrushed life. Was Karsh a terrible
social climber? Why did he tell his first wife that he couldn’t love
her `in the way [she] should be loved’? Why didn’t he make plans for
his parents (in Syria) to follow him to Canada once he was rich and
successful? Isn’t it frustrating to be told so frequently that Karsh
was amusing company without a single instance to support the claim? I
am reminded of a television make-up lady I had once who seemed to be
doing a really good job on me. `What are you using? It’s terrific!’ I
said. `Just concealer,’ she replied, baffled. If Tippett barely quotes
from Karsh’s autobiographical writings, one starts to suspect that the
reason is pure despair. After all, a) his first wife probably wrote
them on his behalf in any case, and b) they are specifically designed
to reveal sod all.
So this book is mainly an easy and readable account of Karsh’s
ever-burgeoning celebrity, based on an immense talent and appetite for
monumentalising. In common with his heroine, the 19th-century
photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Karsh believed in a spirit of
greatness that could be fixed for eternity on a piece of photographic
paper if you just managed to get the lighting right. He arrived for
sittings both well briefed on his subject’s life and equipped with
polite, prepared conversational questions, such as `What do you think
of the link between smoking and lung cancer?’ He would have previously
set up banks of lights. He devised new, ingenious ways of getting the
hands into shot. And after the picture was taken, an unspecified amount
of work (usually by others) went into retouching the image until it was
flawless.
I would have liked much more about technical matters. Only once is an
exposure time mentioned (a tenth of a second for Churchill), and the
knowledge that Karsh’s camera of choice had a white case, instead of
the usual black, leaves me a little unsatisfied. Tippett mentions the
huge amount of equipment that had to be shipped to Europe, but she
doesn’t open the containers to peek inside. I would have liked to know
how many shots were generally taken at each sitting, and whether
sitters were involved in selecting images. I would have liked more on
the general context of 20th-century photography. But most of all, I
would have liked much better reproductions of the pictures themselves,
which are nicely placed in the run of the text (which is good), but
reproduced in quite murky half-tone (which is shocking).
Incidentally, few of Karsh’s smoking portraits are in the book ‘ in
fact, I think there’s only Humphrey Bogart. There is a great Karsh
photograph of Tennessee Williams so wreathed in smoke that you can’t
help thinking his hair is on fire; Peter Lorre, Laurence Olivier and
André Malraux are all similarly depicted with gaspers, and there are
many self-portraits of Karsh with fag in hand. None of these makes an
appearance, and one has to ask: is this a case of yet more historical
airbrushing?
HOCUS FOCUS
The final version of Karsh’s famous Churchill portrait was markedly
different from the original. Not only was it heavily cropped, but a lot
of work was done to make the sitter less tired, his hands smoother, and
areas of white more luminous. When a critic crowed that Karsh had
raised photography to the level of painting, she was closer to the
truth than she realised.
PORTRAIT IN LIGHT AND SHADOW: The Life of Yousuf Karsh by Maria Tippett
Yale £25 pp426
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £22.50 (including
p&p) on 0870 165 8585