Yousuf Karsh

(Armenian/Canadian, 1908–2002)

Yousuf Karsh was an Armenian-Canadian photographer known for his portraits of Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, and Albert Einstein. “Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can,” he once explained. “The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world.” Born Hovsep Karsh on December 23, 1908 in Mardin, Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), he grew up amidst the turmoil of the Armenian Genocide. He and his family fled to Syria before emigrating to Canada as refugees in 1923. Growing up in Quebec, Karsh learned photography from his uncle who ran a portrait studio in the town of Sherbrooke. He later apprenticed under John H. Garo in Boston during the late 1920s. Opening his first studio in Ottawa in 1932, one of Karsh’s early patrons was Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King. King helped the young artist set up appointments to photograph foreign dignitaries visiting the country. Over the decades the followed, he made many notable portraits, including those of Georgia O’Keeffe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Nikita Khrushchev. Karsh retired in 1992, and later relocated to Boston, MA, where he died on July 13, 2002 at the age of 93. Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Royal Collection in London, among others.