Ottawa Citizen, Canada
Nov 28 2008
Karsh to have global anniversary exhibition
Portrait Gallery, science and tech museum plan centenary celebrations
Laura Payton, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, November 28, 2008
Famed Ottawa photographer Yousuf Karsh’s work will be exhibited in
Ottawa and around the world this year, in a celebration of the 100th
anniversary of his birth, the Portrait Gallery of Canada and the
Canada Museum of Science and Technology announced yesterday.
The gallery and the museum have organized Festival Karsh, with a
website featuring his work going live on Dec. 23, the centenary of
Karsh’s birth. The events will also include an exhibit at the Museum
of Science and Technology, an online group to share portraits and
stories, and the Karsh Trail, a self-guided tour around Ottawa
buildings where Karsh worked and where his work will be displayed.
"Yousuf Karsh was about unlimited and intense involvement with people,
both those before his lens and those looking at his photographs," said
Lilly Koltun, the portrait gallery’s director general, who posed for
Karsh in 1987 and recalled how he requested she wear a specific
outfit. "It was the first time I realized just how sensitive (he was)
to his environment, and particularly to style."
The exhibition, called Karsh the Storyteller, will feature some of his
original prints and artifacts, including darkroom equipment and the
cameras he used from 1958 until his retirement in the late ’90s. It
will also include a studio experience in which visitors can become
portrait photographers and portrait subjects. It will run from June 12
to Oct. 12 next year, and will be available for travel in Canada and
abroad until 2012.
Some of the portraits and stories featured in Karsh the Storyteller
will be gathered through the festival’s website, festivalkarsh.ca, and
an online photosharing group called My Karsh on the website Flickr.
Portraits allow people to search for meaning and understanding, says
Jack Horwitz, whose father and uncle each sat for Karsh portraits.
"It’s a world that is locked in memory, at which we unlock that memory
and there is mystery behind it," Horwitz said. "When we look at the
portraits that this man took, it’s akin to entering into those lives."
Alia Hogben sat for Karsh when her family arrived in Ottawa for her
father’s posting as Indian high commissioner. Karsh had asked her
father if she would model for a portrait, but her father, she says,
being a protective Indian father, turned him down. After Karsh finally
took the portrait, he used it in a 1958 Maclean’s magazine feature on
the most beautiful women in Canada.
"When I was 17 and the photographs came out, people kept saying, ‘Oh
he only liked you because he’s Armenian and he likes dark women,’"
Hogben joked.