SEPTEMBER 7 - NOVEMBER 6
Yousuf Karsh, one of the greatest portrait photographers of the twentieth century, achieved a distinct style in his theatrical lighting. Karsh photographed many of the celebrated personalities of his time—Andy Warhol, Fidel Castro, Peter Lorre, Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Pablo Picasso, and Albert Einstein, among many others.
Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia-in-Turkey in 1908. To escape the massacres in their homeland, his family fled to Syria in 1922 and immigrated to Canada two years later, where he joined his uncle, George Nakash, a photographer living in Sherbrooke, Québec. Nakash arranged for Yousuf to go to Boston in 1928, to apprentice with John Garo, an eminent portrait photographer whose studio was on Boylston Street. Since the ebullient Garo photographed only by available light, on long winter evenings he welcomed artists from the worlds of literature, theater, and music. Karsh later wrote, “It was here I set my heart on photographing those men and women who leave their mark on the world.”
The empathy Karsh established with his sitters came naturally. He had great sensitivity and an instinctive understanding of each person who sat before his lens. He quickly established an atmosphere of trust so that the sitting became a true collaboration. Karsh was not only a uniquely gifted photographer, but also a superb printer. He was exacting in every stage of his work, and this artistic talent and technical skill were blended to produce iconic portraits of Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Casals, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Karsh worked through his 82nd year and closed his studio in 1992. By the time he retired, he had held 15,312 sittings, produced over 150,000 negatives, and left an invaluable artistic and historic document of the men and women who shaped our world.
Humphrey Bogart
