Globe and Mail, Canada
Nov 3 2007
The well-lit life
KEITH GAREBIAN
November 3, 2007
PORTRAIT IN LIGHT
AND SHADOW
The Life of Yousuf Karsh
By Maria Tippett
Anansi, 426 pages, $39.95
Yousuf Karsh (who died at 93 on July 13, 2002) was one of the great
portrait photographers. He seemed to have photographed just about
everybody who was anybody in royalty, politics, business and the arts,
and he was able to arrange sittings in the Vatican, Buckingham Palace,
the White House and the Kremlin. His work was reproduced in magazines
and newspapers around the world – from Time, Newsweek, Life and the
Illustrated London News to Saturday Night, Maclean’s, Paris Match, the
Daily Express, The New York Times and Stern. International museums
held special Karsh exhibitions, and his portraits of Churchill,
Khrushchev, the young Queen Elizabeth, George Bernard Shaw and
Pablo Casals (among many others) made the human face a legend.
Legions of celebrities yearned to be "Karshed," and many of his books
and lithographs were among the fastest-selling in the
world. Considered "the Rembrandt" of portrait photographers because of
his extraordinary control of light and shadow and his painterly
manipulation of middle tones, Karsh emphasized hands as much as the
face, and he was able to romanticize his subjects. His first two books
of portraits (Faces of Destiny and Portraits of Greatness) made clear
that he was after dignity, not glamour; authority, not sensation;
greatness, not sex.
However, Karsh was considered an old-fashioned court photographer by
his detractors. By equating power and fame with greatness or goodness,
he subscribed to a view of celebrity that ultimately trapped him in a
style that amounted to hero-worship and monotonous respectability. One
critic wrote that his subjects’ faces looked as if they had been
lacquered in bronze. The late photo-journalist Sam Tata remarked in
Maclean’s that Karsh’s work was "an exercise in flattery and
retouching." Barry Callaghan complained of "a sameness about all
Karsh’s work," a result of "pursuing greatness as though it were a
commodity ready to be picked from the faces of those who are great."
Karsh’s portraits often look like greeting-card souvenirs, and they
lack some of the experimental quality found in those by Alfred
Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Bill Brandt, Arnold Newman and
others. Where Diane Arbus, in her direct, intense and unsentimental
portraits, wanted to show "what’s left when you take everything else
away," Karsh sought to embellish the human face. Where Henri
Cartier-Bresson waited to capture "the decisive moment" in spontaneous
reality (as in his stunning shot in 1945 of a female refugee’s
exploding rage at an informer for the Gestapo), Karsh sought to make
things happen – as when he suddenly pulled a cigar out of Winston
Churchill’s mouth before clicking his camera, or when he photographed
Pablo Casals from the rear in a small abbey alcove, focusing light on
the cellist’s back, or when he virtually turned two assembly-line
spray painters at Ford Canada into a tender, homoerotic pair.
Maria Tippett, one of the country’s most distinguished cultural
historians and a Governor-General’s Award-winner for her biography of
Emily Carr, seems to know Karsh’s limitations, but she is guilty of
lacquered hero-worship all her own. She views him as "that most dearly
beloved archetype, the striving immigrant who makes good in the
limitless opportunity of the New World."
The eldest child in an Armenian family from Mardin, Turkey, a family
that survived genocide at the hands of Turkey during the First World
War – he had seen a slain infant hanging on a meat hook – Karsh was
sponsored to Canada by his uncle, George Nakash, a photographer in the
American pictorialist mode, who made him his assistant while paying
for his formal education.
Armenians were then "non-preferred" newcomers because their language
and customs represented challenges to Anglo-Saxon traditions. Mocked
for his foreign accent and poor English, he used elaborate politeness
and old-world manners as his protective mask throughout his life. He
spent 12 years of tutelage under John H. (Garo) Garoian, an ebullient
Armenian-American in Boston who encouraged him to study the Old
Masters of painting. Karsh learned to be flamboyant in dress from
Garo, taking to wearing a Borsalino hat and flowing black cape in the
camera room at the height of his later success, following his first
big break as theatre photographer for the Ottawa Drama League, where
he met Solange Gauthier, who became his first wife.
Karsh’s apprenticeship and fame are all covered adequately by Tippet,
who had access to the huge Karsh archives, as well as to his widow
Estrellita (his American second wife) and several of his former
apprentices and assistants. However, the book is stiffly formal and
lacking in flair, reading at times like a textbook history, and more
concerned with externals than with the inner man.
Though Tippett acknowledges that "as with his black and white
portraits, Karsh left some parts of his life in light and other parts
in shadow" in his autobiography (In Search of Greatness), she does not
explore, much less illuminate, some of those shadowed parts. She gives
quick mention to the Armenian genocide in her section on his boyhood
in Mardin and Syria. She notes the adult Karsh’s moods of depression,
but fails to explore their possible roots. She subsequently refers to
Karsh’s reluctance to be seen as part of the Armenian community in
Ottawa, and of his apparent reluctance to help certain family members
immigrate to Canada, but she doesn’t question whether such shrinking
or shirking had anything to do with the inner turmoil of a genocide
survivor.
Her book is shallowly repetitive about many things: how Solange was
his perfect helpmate, putting his subjects at ease, keeping the books,
encouraging his ambition, giving him access to many of the most
influential politicians and dignitaries in Ottawa; how Karsh used
lighting and hands in portraits; how he and his wife were treated as
international celebrities; and how he was interested in humanity
rather than in politics.
However, deeper questions – about the intimate side of the marriage,
the limits of his concept of greatness and of his craft, and the
inscape of his personality – are given scant treatment. Her biography
casts light on the already well illuminated aspects of Karsh’s legend,
but its style is workmanlike rather than voluptuous.
Keith Garebian’s books include Frida: Paint Me as a Volcano.