Yousef Karsh - Master Portrait Photographer of the 20th Century
By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me. It was at that instant that I took the photograph."
Yousuf Karsh, "Winston Churchill" Digital Scan of Photograph, 1941, http://karsh.org/photographs/winston-churchill
Winston Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940-45 and 1951-55. He is remembered by history as a strong leader, crass, and brutish. He was a bull dog of a man and chain smoked big fat cigars. This is however a photography blog, so we are going to discuss not the Englishman, but the Armenian immigrant who lived in Canada.
Yousuf Karsh was a portrait photographer in the twentieth century and one of my favorite photographers of all time. Karsh himself admits....
“My portrait of Winston Churchill changed my life. I knew after I had taken it that it was an important picture, but I could hardly have dreamed that it would become one of the most widely reproduced images in the history of photography.”
Churchill was visiting Ottowa, giving speeches to rally the world to the cause of defeating Hitler and Mussolini. You can listen to the highlights of the speech here.
Anyway, As Karsh explains the encounter, Churchill was being escorted by Canadian Prime Minister Mckenzie King and their entourages. Having no idea Canada was planning a photo op...
"I switched on my floodlights; a surprised Churchill growled, ‘What’s this, what’s this?’ No one had the courage to explain."
After timidly explaining he would like to create a portrait for the occasion, Churchill lit a cigar, began to puff, and relented.... "You may take one."
Refusing to give up his cigar, Karsh began double checking all the settings on his lights and camera and probably shaking a little under the pressure of getting it perfect in one shot. Karsh explains the rest of the story best....
"He continued to chomp vigorously at his cigar. I waited. Then I stepped toward him and, without premeditation, but ever so respectfully, I said, ‘Forgive me, sir,’ and plucked the cigar out of his mouth. By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me. It was at that instant that I took the photograph."
Karsh is one of the most notable photographers of his time, creating portraits of Bogart and Bacall, the Apollo II crew, and Muhammad Ali, to name just a few. This photo he did for Ford of Canada is a testament to his compositional and lighting expertise. It is difficult to understand the amount of thought that goes into these photos unless you have taken one with a film SLR before.
In general, Karsh's portraits can be described as simple but intimate. Each portrait he takes seems to capture the subject in an unscripted moment of internal thought. This is ever present in the hopeful stare of Martin Luther King Jr. the Civil Rights leader. You can also see it in Ernest Hemingway's detached stare into the distance, Muhammad Ali's confident smile, or Andy Warhol's playful gaze.
When you photography tells you capturing the essence of the subject in your photo, this is what they have in mind. Yousuf Karsh could write the book on photographing people. His style is simple and to the point, we can all learn a lot by staring at his photographs. His understanding of light, exposure, and his camera is nothing short of admirable.
Just remember if you work hard enough, you can move mountains. And if you're as good as Yousuf Karsh you can get the belligerent Churchill to smirk.
How a camera works
If you are interested in learning more about your camera or photography in general, comment below!
Have you ever wondered what makes that iphone camera of yours works so well? Have you ever wondered the differences between todays digital cameras and the old film SLR's used by our parents and grandparents? In this blog post we are going to tackle the science and early history behind how the camera actually does what it does!
The first thing to know is that light moves in straight lines. We see this all the time, it is not that revolutionary of an observation. Think of light passing through an old vintage keyhole with a light on the other side because you know, that happens all the time....
Now as far back as 400BC, the founder of Mohism, Mo-ti is attributed with the first observation of what happens when light is forced through a pinhole. It is a really weird phenomenon which makes not only a camera, but your visual perception possible. He observed that in a dark room, if you only allow light to enter through one small hole or "aperture" whatever you would see looking out through the hole, is actually projected onto the opposite wall, upside down.
This physical property of light was first called the Camera Obscura. Imagine you are standing in a box, picture that, whatever kind of box you want provided it is 100% sealed from light. It is pretty dark and scary in that box isn't it? We better let some light in....
If you were to take a knife or needle or whatever your preferred poking instrument is... If you were to make a small hole on one side of the box you would be forcing light to travel into that box through a straight line. Now turn around and face the wall opposite the hole.... If your box was located in the Roman forum, you would probably see something that looks like this.
Pretty cool right? It is because of this weird property of light which makes photography possible at all. This is also how your eye works. Your pupil acts like a pinhole in a dark room. You can turn your room into a Camera Obscura like the one shown above. You can also go visit some which are tourist attractions on the West coast (1450 Ocean Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90401) and East coast (Front Street, Mitchell Park, Greenport, NY11944.)
Now if we knew this in 400BC, why did it take until the 19th century to take the first photo? Well! The trick wasn't getting the image on the wall, it was printing the image and making it permanent. The first person to figure this out was Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. He took a photo from his window which looks over his estate. Back in the day, only people wealthy enough to have free time and funds to purchase chemistry sets made photographs. It was thought of as an interesting hobby rather than a form of art.
Now in order to get this image, he coated a pewter plate with a solution of bitumen he had previously experimented with. He placed it in the pinhole box (camera) and let the light hit the plate for eight hours, hardening the solution where it was touched by light. After exposing the plate, he rinsed it with lavender oil and white petroleum which washed away the bitumen that had not hardened during the eight hour exposure.
Everything from this point up to the advent of digital cameras has been a refining of this concept and process. Different chemicals were used, lenses were added to the pinhole light-boxes, and people sued each other over copyrights in an attempt to make a quick buck. The pewter plate would turn into metal tins, then glass plates, and eventually film.
It wasn't long before George Eastman's Kodak company brought a refined process to the public on an unprecedented scale. Using light weight film as oppose to heavy glass plates, they sold small film cameras which could be bought, sent to Kodak where they would be processed and printed, and sent back to the customer. Anyone born before 1995 remembers taking their photos on the little yellow kodak cameras and waiting a week to get their film developed.
Throughout the 20th century, most photographs you see where gelatin silver prints. These were the modern film SLR cameras used by Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, and even Anne Leibowitz up until digital became the norm. Think about all the old tv shows which show a young scrappy photojournalist who converted a bathroom into their darkroom. Now a digital camera works exactly like a film camera with one important difference...
Instead of film strip sitting on the back wall of our special box, a digital camera has a sensor. I wont go into the detailed process of building it, you can read about it here. But the spoiler is that Steven Sasson, a 24 year old working at Kodak, figured out how to use a Charged Coupling Device (C.C.D.) to capture an image. Instead of physically burning the image onto a light sensitive film, it is burning the image into an electronic signal through the light sensitive CCD panel.
Further and further refinement through innovations of the 21st century have led us to where we are now. Everyone these days has a camera built into their phone. The technology is only going to get better moving forward as it has been for the last century and a half.
Now a days everyone is a photographer. I hope with this blog, we can move forward by making everyone a better photographer. If you are interested in learning more about your camera or photography in general, email me or comment below!
Sources:
http://www.obscurajournal.com/history.php
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/firstphotograph/process/#top
