Yousuf Karsh

Born in December of 1908, in the eastern Ottoman Empire (Present-day Turkey), Yousuf Karsh is regarded as one of the greatest portrait photographers the world has ever known. Growing up during the Armenian Genocide, Karsh and family fled to Syria when he was 14 to avoid persecution. At 16 he was sent to live in Quebec with his photographer uncle George Nakash, where he assisted in Nakash’s studio. In 1928 Nakash arranged for Karsh to serve under American photographer John Garo in Boston as an apprentice. Karsh’s brother, Malak, achieved fame in the photographic community when a photo of floating logs that he took became featured on the Canadian one-dollar-bill.

Four years later, Karsh returned to Canada, forming a studio in the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, near Canada’s seat of government where he was discovered by Prime Minister Mackenzie King and asked to photograph visiting dignitaries. Even though he photographed many celebrities, he achieved his greatest fame photographing Winston Churchill on December 30^th, 1941 after he gave a speech to the Canadian House of Commons. The image became one of the most reproduced portraits in history and in 1967 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, getting promoted to Companion in 1990. Karsh over the course of his life had managed to be the only Canadian to make the list of the 100 most famous celebrities of the century as determined by the International Who’s Who of 2000, of which he himself photographed 51. At 93 years of age, Karsh moved to Boston in the late 1990s, dying in 2002 from complications arising from a surgery. He was buried in the Notre Dame Cemetery in Ottawa.