Vernissage / Art Opening Reception: Yousuf Karsh

For over sixty years numerous world famous people in politics, theology, royalty, the arts and sciences posed for Armenian-born Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002). These "contemporary historical documents," as he called them, are often the images by which these renowned people are best known.

In the early 1980’s,The French Library Alliance Française was privileged to receive a collection of Karsh’s portraits of French thinkers, artists and statesmen including Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Louis Jouvet, André Malraux, Marcel Marceau, Georges Pompidou.

These portraits and others will be on display in the FLAF gallery from March 26 through March 31.

Marcel Marceau	Albert Camus	André Malraux
Photos © Estate of Yousuf Karsh	Photos © Estate of Yousuf Karsh	Photos © Estate of Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia-in-Turkey in 1908. To escape the massacres in their homeland, his family fled to Syria in 1922 and immigrated to Canada two years later, where he joined his uncle, George Nakash, a photographer living in Sherbrooke, Québec. Nakash arranged for Yousuf to go to Boston in 1928, to apprentice with John Garo, an eminent portrait photographer whose studio was on Boylston Street. Since the ebullient Garo photographed only by available light, on long winter evenings he welcomed artists from the worlds of literature, theater, and music. Karsh later wrote, "It was here I set my heart on photographing those men and women who leave their mark on the world."

The empathy Karsh established with his sitters came naturally. He had great sensitivity and an instinctive understanding of each person who sat before his lens. He quickly established an atmosphere of trust so that the sitting became a true collaboration. Karsh was not only a uniquely gifted photographer, but also a superb printer. He was exacting in every stage of his work, and this artistic talent and technical skill were blended to produce iconic portraits of Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Casals, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Karsh worked through his 82nd year and closed his studio in 1992. By the time he retired, he had held 15,312 sittings, produced over 150,000 negatives, and left an invaluable artistic and historic document of the men and women who shaped our world.

Jerry Fielder Jerry Fielder has degrees in television production from UCLA and photography from the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara where he was hired in 1979 by Karsh. He worked for Karsh for 24 years, assisting with sittings and organizing his work prints and negatives in preparation for their acquisition by the National Archives of Canada. He became his curator when the studio closed in 1992, a position he still holds on behalf of the Karsh estate. Fielder has worked on major exhibitions around the world in such venues as the National Portrait Gallery (London), the National Gallery of Australia, the International Center of Photography (NY), and many more. He lectures on the life and work of Karsh.