Yousuf Karsh first captured my eye when I saw his portrait of Winston Churchill when I did a project on WWII. I saw his portrait and I knew that there had to have been a whole new level of talent required to take that photo, it intrigued me.
Yousuf Karsh was an Armenian-Canadian portrait photographer born in 1908. He had a very hard start to life, He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he saw his relatives massacred and his sister die of starvation while they were driven from village to village. When he was 16 his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. This was where he was introduced to the world of photography.
He photographed the most important of people and there is a big reason for that. Karsh was the type of photographer that truly has the talent to peer into ones soul. When he looked through his lens, a whole world would open up. He must have been a very intuitive person; he could see the motivation behind a facial expression and every word spoken, which he manages to portray in every photo. It’s almost like his pictures are drawn-every portrait captures the person in such an honest and vulnerable way. Every feature on the persons face is screaming out their story in the most subtle way. Karsh manages to take the picture in the best moment and you can tell this was intentional by his artist statement. It was never luck when he chose to press the shutter-he chose his moment so well, like immediately after the subject has said something very personal or intriguing. It is this type of talent that makes Yousuf Karsh my favourite photographer and why he is such a well known photographer.
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