Framed Photogravure - WINSTON CHURCHILL - Yosef Karsh

Karsh is most famous for his portrait of Winston Churchill. One of Churchill's trademarks was his cigar. When Karsh posed Churchill, he allowed Churchill to hold his cigar. Karsh, in his informal style, walked up to Churchill supposedly to get a light level. He held in his hand the remote for his camera. Standing in front of Churchill, Karsh casually pulled the cigar from the lips of Churchill and walked back toward his camera. As he walked he clicked his remote and brilliantly captured the "cross and indignant" look on Churchill's face.

Yousuf Karsh is one of the masters of portraiture in the twentieth century. Born in Armenia in 1908, he and his entire family lived through the massacres of 1915 and fled to Syria in 1922. Many months later, in January 1924, he set foot on Canadian soil. Karsh was always searching for beauty, truth, and goodness, and through his own convincing world of photography, he found this conception of humanity in the faces of the beautiful, the wealthy, the influential, and those who shaped the ideas of the Western world. Among his subjects were politicians and authors, artists and actors, members of royal families, and musicians, whose portraits he wove into a dramatic panorama. Yousuf Karsh's photographs are revered as being definitive windows to the soul, and to the world. He is one of the early portrait photographers that raised photography to an art form.