Yousuf Karsh was one of the greatest portrait photographers.

Best known for his World War II portraits of Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower and other leaders of the Allied cause, Karsh of Ottawa, as he was called professionally, traveled the world to photograph political and military leaders, as well as celebrated writers, artists and entertainers.

His portraits were reproduced widely in newspapers and magazines as well as in books, and many of them have become the best-loved and most familiar images of their subjects. His most famous portraits include: the 1941 picture of Churchill as an indomitable wartime leader; George Bernard Shaw as quizzical old sage in 1943; Eisenhower in 1946 as a five-star general and supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; Ernest Hemingway in a turtle-neck sweater in 1957; Georgia O'Keeffe in her New Mexico studio in 1956, and Nikita Khrushchev swathed in fur in 1963. He also photographed Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Fidel Castro and Andy Warhol. Karsh was a master of the formally posed, carefully lighted studio portrait. Working with a large-format view camera and a battery of artificial lights (he was said to carry 350 pounds - nearly 160 kilograms - of equipment on his trips abroad) he aimed, in his own words, "to stir the emotions of the viewer" and to "lay bare the soul" of his sitter.