I recently purchased this book: Karsh. A Biography in Images. Of course I was familiar with his famous picture of Winston Churchill, but other than than I really didn’t know much about Yousuf Karsh’s work.

Now I do, and I’m really impressed. I’m somewhat in awe of the great portrait photographers. They make it look so easy, when in reality it isn’t at all. And I suspect that Karsh may well have been the best of them. He seems to have the knack for getting inside his subjects and understanding them very well indeed.

The book is titled: “a biography” and indeed there’s a foreword by Malcolm Rogers (Ann and Graham Gund, Director, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and a commentary by Jerry Fiedler (Yousuf Karsh curator), which takes the form of a short introduction to each of the three major sections: The Early Years; On Assignment; and Portraits. Other than that everything is by Karsh. There’s a 16 page introductory section entitled “Reminiscences” written by Karsh himself, and each of the photographs has a, sometimes lengthy, caption – also written by Karsh. As an example this is what he had to say about the Picasso portrait above:

Pablo Picasso. 1954. The maestro’s villa was a photographer’s nightmare, with his boisterous children bicycling through vast rooms already crowded with canvases. I eagerly accepted Picasso’s alternate suggestion to meet later in Vallauris at his ceramic gallery. “He will never be here”, the gallery owner commented, when my assistant and two hundred pounds of equipment arrived. “He says the same thing to every photographer”. To everyone’s amazement, the “old lion” not only kept his photographic appointment with me but was prompt and wore a new shirt. He could partially view himself in my large format lens and intuitively moved to complete the composition.

With so much written by Karsh himself, it feels much more like an autobiography than a biography.

And then there are the photographs: more than 100 of them. Amazing! Apart from the Churchill and Picasso pictures my personal favorites are Turban (Betty Low); Fidel Castro; Audrey Hepburn; George Bernard Shaw; Ernest Hemingway; and Albert Einstein.

Best money I’ve spent in some time. Now if only I could take portraits like these.