Karsh: Master of the Portrait

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) was the best-known photographer in Canada and one of the best-known photographers in the world for several decades. He came to fame in the early 1940s, perfected his distinctive black and white portrait style in the 1950s, and photographed many prominent politicians, artists and public figures over the next 40 years.^[1]

Karsh’s fame was on the wane by the time he closed his Ottawa studio in 1992. Throughout his career, he remained deeply rooted in traditional portrait photography, always striving to show his sitters in the best light. This approach was Karsh’s core strength but also made his portraits seem increasingly old fashioned to his critics.

In this essay, I consider Karsh’s influences and style, Karsh’s strengths and weaknesses, and three of my favourite portraits.^[2]

Influences and Style

John Garo of Boston was a key influence on the young Karsh. From 1928 to 1931, Karsh apprenticed with Garo, a fellow Armenian and a prominent photographer in the Pictorialist school.^[3] Garo worked in his studio with natural light and sought to produce pleasing portraits of his clientele, which included artists, lawyers and politicians.^[4]

Garo taught Karsh the technical skills of large-format photography, including careful development of negatives and prints.^[5] He encouraged Karsh to study painting in art classes and galleries, particularly Rembrandt and Velasquez. He showed Karsh how to talk with sitters to put them at ease. He included Karsh in his social circle of artists and Boston society members, which met in Garo’s studio for drinks during Prohibition.^[6] And, most importantly, Garo taught Karsh to think independently and to develop a distinctive style.^[7]

Edward Steichen provided another source of inspiration.^[8] Steichen’s celebrity and fashion photography emphasized contrast, sharp focus and artificial lighting, rather than the painterly approach and natural light of the Pictorialists. Steichen met to discuss photography when Karsh visited New York in the late 1930s; later, he posed for Karsh on several occasions.^[9] Karsh followed Steichen’s portrait work in Vanity Fair, and adopted elements from it, giving Karsh’s photography a more “modern feel”.^[10]

Karsh’s experience with live theatre also had an important impact on his career. After opening his first studio in 1932, Karsh joined an amateur theatre company known as the Ottawa Little Theatre. There, he photographed actors on stage, and came to appreciate how artificial light could be used to create different moods at will.^[11] “Working with daylight in Garo’s studio one had to wait – often for hours – for the light to be right. In this new situation, instructions about lighting effects were given by the director; he could command the lighting to do what he wished.”^[12]

Most fundamentally, Karsh gained a strong, positive attitude from his mother, something that guided him throughout his life. As a child in Armenia, Karsh saw atrocities committed by the Turks against Armenians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, lost two uncles when they were murdered while in prison, lost his sister in a typhus epidemic, and was forced to flee with his family on foot to Syria. Despite the hatred shown to his family, Karsh’s mother (a devout Christian) insisted that all people shared a common humanity.^[13]

These influences explain Karsh’s approach to photography. He was rooted in the tradition of formal portraits and dedicated to his subjects, researching them in advance and interacting with them politely during his sittings. He paid close attention to the lighting and posing of his subjects, and the later printing of his silver gelatin prints. His portraits strove to show his sitters at their best, and often have a strong sense of theatricality to them, which can be intriguing but (sometimes) contrived.

Karsh developed his style of dramatic posing and lighting in the period after he rose to fame for his iconic 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill.^[14] He perfected his style in the 1940s and 1950s, when he shot some of his strongest portraits.^[15] For the remainder of his career, his style – called monumental and reminiscent of film noir – remained more or less fixed.^[16]

Critics found fault with Karsh for repeating the same stories about his sitters in interviews, for using the same photographs from the 1940s and 1950s in his later retrospective books, and for his lack of experimentation.^[17] Near the end of Karsh’s career, British and Canadian critics called his work “reactionary”, off-putting for its focus on “important” people, and “an exercise in flattery and retouching”.^[18] Karsh was unrepentant, calling the comments uninformed or inaccurate.^[19] Asked in 2000 if his portraits had become old-fashioned, he responded that the human face hadn’t changed.^[20]

Karsh once said his aim was to sum up the entire person in a single photograph – in a sense, to capture their soul.^[21] Critics argue that, instead, Karsh created a modern iconography, clothing the elite in a positive glow and creating a new way for the masses to experience them. As curator Anne O’Hehir writes: “What Karsh creates are heroes for our time. His subjects become embodiments of archetypal abstract ideals of goodness and greatness.”^[22]

Strengths and Weaknesses

Karsh was a master of artificial lighting, often using multiple lights for the desired effect.^[23] His lighting heightens the drama of his portraits and creates texture in the skin of his male subjects: in Boris Karloff, 1946, a combination of harsh and moderate light gives the face a striking look, while in Albert Schweitzer, 1954, complex lighting creates competing highlights on the forehead.^[24] For female subjects, Karsh’s lighting emphasizes their unblemished skin.^[25]

Karsh poses and lights his subjects in a way that makes strong use of both positive and negative space. Again and again, he positions his subject to create a dramatic shape in the foreground and then uses a dark background to surround the subject’s face or upper body.^[26] “He characteristically achieved a heroic monumentality in which the sitter’s face, grave, thoughtful and impressive, emerged from a dark, featureless background,” the New York Times writes.^[27]

Most impressively, Karsh manages to capture some aspect of his subject’s personality in his best images. Winston Churchill radiates glowering defiance, through his expression and posture (particularly the position of his hands).^[28] Ernest Hemmingway shows a surprising vulnerability, rather than the strength and arrogance I would have expected.^[29] Glenn Gould plays the piano with his attention focussed inwardly, eyes closed and long fingers hovering above the keyboard.^[30]

David Travis argues that Karsh’s portraits seek the decisive moment, but in a different way than Henri Cartier-Bresson:^[31]

“When one examines Karsh’s photographs, one sees only a few pictures that emphasize the timing of the exposure instead of the personality of the subject. In general, his compositions describe a moment of repose. That, after all, was part of the tradition of portraiture he learned from Garo and from his study of painters. But a moment of repose is itself a definite moment, even if it is not always one of split-second drama.”^[32]

However, there are elements of Karsh’s photography that I find wanting.

Karsh uses props with many of his subjects to reveal an aspect of their personality. Some of these props are distracting or cheesy. In Andy Warhol, 1979, the visual artist poses with a Minox camera against his cheek.^[33] Warhol’s face and the Minox compete for the viewer’s attention, while his hands are bunched up in an unattractive way to support the camera.^[34] In Vladimir Nabokov, 1972, the writer holds a small image of a butterfly beside his chin. The butterfly is supposed to contrast with Nabokov’s weathered face and acknowledge his interest in lepidopterology, but it distracts from Nabokov’s mournful expression.^[35]

Despite Karsh’s experience in posing subjects, some of his poses look wooden. You can see this in his early portraits, where the subjects are locked in theatrical poses or stand stiffly at attention.^[36] The same applies to some later work: Karsh’s front view of Albert Einstein, 1948 and his side view of John F. Kennedy, 1960, both with hands tightly clasped, look like photographs of cleverly-constructed mannequins rather than actual people.^[37]

Finally, Karsh’s occasional colour photographs are underwhelming: they seem flat and lifeless, like inferior copies of black and white originals.^[38] For Karsh’s 1979 portraits of Andy Warhol, consider how the skin tones and highlights appear natural in the black and white version but forced and artificial in the colour version. Or, desaturate his colour portrait of Henry Moore, 1973 to see how a good colour image becomes an excellent black and white one.^[39]

Three Portraits

I had a chance to see silver gelatin prints of three of my favourite Karsh portraits at The World of Yousuf Karsh: A Private Essence, an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.^[40]

George Bernard Shaw, 1943

For Shaw’s portrait, the playwright is seated in a dark room, his right hand holding his glasses away from his chest. The chair forms a frame across the bottom of the image, with the fingers of Shaw’s left hand curled and resting on the chair arm. The lighter parts of the image are Shaw’s hands, held close to one another in the bottom-left, and Shaw’s bearded face in the top-right, held so it lines up with the right-hand corner. A handkerchief hangs loosely from Shaw’s suit jacket pocket, with different grey tones from the jacket, and provides another point of interest. The key features of the image are the careful arrangement of Shaw’s hands and head, and the quizzical expression on Shaw’s face.^[41]

Pablo Casals, 1954

Casals is seated at the bottom of the image in a solid-looking chair, in a bare room with rough stone walls. Surprisingly, he is facing away from the photographer, with the back of his (partially bald) head brightly lit.^[42] The head of his cello is visible to the left of his head, while his right arm holds the bow which is outlined in light. The floor of the room is brightly lit, and in the top, right-hand corner of the image there is a narrow window with a slit of bright light. The right-hand side of the image is framed by a dark and out-of-focus wall, as if the photographer is peeking around a corner. This is a wonderful image because of its balance of dark and light, and the way Casals’ figure, although small, seems to dominate the space.^[43]

Estrellita Karsh, 1963

Photographed in the year after her marriage to Yousuf, Estrellita appears against a light background that varies from grey to white, in an almost clinical side profile. The portrait emphasizes her prominent nose and long neck, as well as a teardrop-shaped earring that hangs near the mid-point of her profile. Bright highlights pick out some details of her hair, which is pinned by combs at the back of the head. Her eye looks forward and is barely visible below long lashes. What makes the image exceptional is its sense of warmth and lightness; David Travis writes that it is “almost worshipful in its serenity and grace”.^[44]

Posted: June 2024.

For Further Information

For information on Karsh and a large collection of his photographs, see the website set up by individuals associated with his estate: www.karsh.org.

For a collection of Karsh photographs from the 1930s to the 1970s, see the National Portrait Gallery (U.K.) website: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/set?set=262&wPage=3.

For a collection of Karsh photographs with a wide-ranging essay on Karsh’s development and style, see: David Travis, Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009).