ARTFUL ARMENIAN WON WINNIE OVER
By Tom Rosenthal
Daily Mail
s/books/authors.html?in_article_id=534008&in_p age_id=1826
March 14 2008
UK
PORTRAIT IN LIGHT AND SHADOW: THE LIFE OF YOUSUF KARSH by Maria Tippett
(Yale University Press, £25)
Portrait of a war-winner: Winston Churchill photographed by Yousuf
Karsh
Long before computers were invented and computer-generated, or at
least enhanced, imagery became commonplace in the gutter Press,
Hollywood and even BBC television, skilled photographers could cheat
away with impunity.
One of the first – and foremost – to do this on a quite spectacular
scale was the Armenian-born Canadian Yousuf Karsh who, for several
decades, was the world’s leading portrait photographer.
Karsh was born 100 years ago. Unfortunately, 1908 was the year that the
Young Turks came to power in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) and,
though the Turkish government has always denied it, there was over
the next few years a systematic massacre of the Christian Armenians
who lived in Turkey.
Karsh’s family managed to escape to Syria and young Yousuf (Joseph)
left as a 14-year-old for Canada where he worked as the assistant to
his photographer uncle, George Nakash.
Always a quick learner, he was soon apprenticed to another Armenian,
John Garo, the leading portrait photographer in Boston.
There, he learned not only his craft but also from Garo his prodigious
social gifts, a sure-footed knowledge of painting and portraiture
of the pre-photography years and above all, great charm to make even
the prickliest of sitters feel comfortable.
ONLY recently , the American writer Michael Greenberg reported on his
experience of having a publicity image made by a distinguished woman
photographer: ‘She was putting me at my ease, encouraging an intimacy
with no future that is the nature of the pact between portraitist
and subject.’
Karsh would never have put it so frankly and, ironically, his most
famous portrait, that of Winston Churchill, was most definitely not
at ease.
Britain’s war leader had reluctantly agreed to give Karsh a brief
sitting, not in Karsh’s studio where the photographer could control
everything, but in the Speaker’s Chamber at the Parliament building
in Ottowa, where Churchill had just given a rousing speech to the
Canadian people at the height of the war. Churchill was puffing away
at his ubiquitous cigar; Karsh proffered an ashtray since his sitters
were not allowed to smoke while he photographed them.
The great man ignored Karsh and went on smoking, so the diminutive
photographer snatched the cigar from the Prime Minister’s mouth
and snapped the image of Churchill as Roaring Lion, the very
personification of belligerent leadership.
The photograph became an international icon and Karsh of Ottawa as he
called himself, and his company, became world famous. Churchill got
over Karsh’s impudence and let him take another picture, this time
smiling, but steadfastly refused for the rest of his life to grant
Karsh a further sitting despite the photographer’s many visits to
London. This was perhaps the one major disappointment of his career,
although he was also turned down by General de Gaulle and Chairman Mao.
But having struggled to make a living in his early years in Ottawa, he
gradually became wealthy as to be photographed by Karsh was a status
symbol in its own right. Popes, presidents, film stars, writers,
King George VI and the present Queen all sat for him.
Business tycoons demanded to be immortalised by Karsh’s lens, rather
than by dull, academic portrait painters.
Slightly built, only 5ft 6in tall, prematurely bald, his assiduous
charm supported by two wives of formidable organisational skills,
with an ego as described by Maria Tippett as gigantic as that of many
of his subjects, he dominated international portrait photography for
four decades.
And, if his camera did not lie, his skills in the darkroom, in which
he would re-touch and alter his photographs at will, were if anything
even greater than his original exposures with their artful lighting
that would emphasise a sitter’s good points (after his first wife or
an assistant had applied make-up).
Thus, he became the court photo-grapher for the second half of the
last century, more or less until his death aged 94 in July 2002.
Having had his second marriage conducted by Bishop Sheen in St
Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, his funeral in Ottawa’s Notre Dame
Cathedral was conducted by the Archbishop.
When British Customs made difficulties over the vast amount of
photographic equipment he was bringing to London, he threatened to
curtail his sitting with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir
Stafford Cripps.
Yet, for all his vanities, Karsh has left us many of the defining
images of some extraordinary 20th-century heroes from Sibelius to
Hemingway, from Sophia Loren to Albert Einstein, from Khrushchev to
Humphrey Bogart.
After President Kennedy’s assassination, Karsh’s picture of John and
Jackie became North America’s fastest-selling photo-graphic portrait,
perhaps because, as so often, he made the famous look just as an
adoring public wanted them to look.
–Boundary_(ID_ECtH552/qgZGqPopQp11DQ)–