THE WORLD ACCORDING TO KARSH

Torontoist
e_world_according_to_karsh.php
Feb 18 2009
Canada

Several kilometres north-west of the city’s limits, we encountered
something we hadn’t been expecting. Families shuffling around in
coordinating Gore-Tex jackets, frail-looking couples clutching crumpled
museum maps, and a few Pretty Young Things looking…surprised. In
fact, everyone looked just a little surprised.

There, in Kleinburg, Ontario, an hour away from Toronto’s acronymic
attractions, we found ourselves in slack-jawed awe of the portraits
propped up before us. Sure, we’d heard of Yousuf Karsh before, but for
all we thought we knew of the Armenian-born photographer, our "new"
impressions of his work trumped all our old preconceptions. Indeed,
the McMichael’s two-part Karsh exhibition ("’Karshed’: Yousuf Karsh
Selected Portraits" and "Yousuf Karsh: Industrial Images") revealed
a world of fleeting moments–captioned by the late photographer
himself. Through this juxtaposition–of Karsh’s images with his own
words–the observer can’t help but see the subject a little more
clearly through the photographer’s eyes; Karsh’s eloquent, written
appraisals of his subjects help to "anchor" his photographs (or so
Barthes would say). His asides provide the context that most captions
fail to deliver: the observer really does walk away from each portrait
with a better understanding of both the subject and photographer.

But back to the photographs themselves. Judging from the tight,
single-file line that snaked from the first "Karshed" portrait to
the thirtieth (and last), it was clear that this portion of the
exhibit was the real crowd-pleaser. Hemingway, Einstein, Warhol,
Churchill–every face on the wall was familiar. And yet there
was something we hadn’t seen–or simply didn’t recognize–in each
portrait. These celebrities looked…human; Karsh rarely captured
(or, at least, framed) "God-like" moments.

Just one room over from "Karshed," the late photographer’s "Industrial
Images" collection drew a slightly (and we really do mean slightly)
thinner crowd. Although Karsh’s subject matter–industrial workers on
the job–had changed, his methodology remained the same: he refused
to remove his subjects from their contexts. By allowing his models
the freedom of, well, doing what they always do, he immortalized
what was second-nature to them. And the result? These workers (from
the Ford Motor Company of Canada, Atlas Steel in Welland, Ontario,
and Pennsylvania’s Sharon Steel) looked just as poised, just as
vulnerable, and just as real as the celebrities on the wall next door.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress