As many as 1. 5 million Armenian people were murdered. Yousuf fled to Syria with his family at age 14 where they found freedom of persecution. At 16, Yousuf was sent to live with his uncle George Nakash in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada.
His uncle George was a photographer and Karsh assisted him at his studio.He also attended school in Canada briefly. Karsh’s brother was also a well known photographer for his famous image of logs floating down the river. His brother Malak, called his work “Paper and Politics”.
This photo was later used on the Canadian one dollar bill. Yousuf went to do apprentice work in 1928 with John Garo. Garo lived in Boston, Massachusetts where he was a well known portrait photographer. Karsh apprenticed under Garo for four years and then returned to Canada feeling confident and ready to work on his own. He established his studio in Ottawa and within walking distance from the Canadian House of Commons.
After making a name for himself and photographing celebrities of his generation, he was given permission by the Prime Minister of Canada to meet and photograph Winston Churchill in 1941. Churchill had given a speech to the House of Commons just three weeks after Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the United States entered World War II. The photo of Churchill is one of Karsh’s greatest portraits. You are looking into the eyes of a man seeing his country being bombed and destroyed almost every night from Nazi blitzkriegs.
The photo is more than a portrait.It truly is a powerful work of art for many reasons and Karsh captured that through his work. Karsh was a master in lighting and capturing the essence of the person he was photographing. He believed that he was revealing a secret side of his subject when taking their photo. He used separate lighting for the subjects hands.
Most of his work was portraits, but he did many different types of photography. He photographed workers at a Ford plant as they sprayed painted the cars. Karsh also captured images in 1945 from the Atlas Steel plant.His subject was also portraits of workers.
Some of his other work included portraits of his subjects hands. One of the most famous of these subjects was Helen Keller. Much of his best work came between the late 1930s and the 1970s. His subjects were some of the most famous people in the world. Some of his subjects include: Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Audrey Hepburn, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Boris Karlof, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth II, Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali, and Humphrey Bogart.
Karsh’s work in in several museums throughout the world. His work as influenced many photographers after his and will continue to influence future photographers as well. His ability to capture the people’s portrait and show the world what they might be thinking or even what their secrets really are. Karsh’s work was to solely capture that unique aspect of photography and he had a unique way of showing his subject with the use of light. He moved to Boston in the early 1990s and died in 2002 at age 93. He will always be known as one of the greatest photographers in the world.
