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Art Institute Celebrates the Life and Work of Master Photographer

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  • Art Institute Celebrates the Life and Work of Master Photographer

    Art Daily
    Jan 7 2009


    Art Institute Celebrates the Life and Work of Master Photographer
    Yousof Karsh



    CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago has organized an exhibition
    that focuses on Yousuf Karsh--the man responsible for some of the 20th
    century's most famous photographic portraits of celebrities and public
    figures. Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes--on view January 22-April 26,
    2009 --highlights the remarkable depth, skill, and poignancy with
    which Karsh captured such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Audrey
    Hepburn, Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O'Keeffe, Albert Einstein,
    Christian Dior, and Marian Anderson. To mark the centenary of his
    birth, this retrospective displays Karsh's best portrait subjects in
    the prints he himself preferred. The 100 photographs in the exhibition
    are drawn from a set of more than 200 master prints given to the Art
    Institute as a promised gift by his widow, Estrellita Karsh.

    Yousuf Karsh arrived in Canada as a teenage refugee, escaping the
    genocide in Turkish Armenia. He was trained by his uncle--and later
    by John Garo in Boston--as a professional portrait photographer. At
    first this meant pleasing his sitters, rather than the editors and
    publishers who, with their staff photographers, kept an eye on
    fashion and celebrity. In 1941, after nine years as a struggling
    young photographer in Ottawa, Karsh captured the unforgettable image
    of Winston Churchill that became known as "the roaring lion." His
    name and his career were made almost instantly. Despite his success,
    Karsh still lived in a period of uncertainty, especially concerning
    the fate of European democracies and indeed the future of Western
    civilization. It was in that period that Karsh captured, like no
    other photographer, the faces of the people who defined the age. It
    is this notion of heroism and its stylistic rendition that the
    exhibition Regarding Heroes examines and illuminates.

    Yousuf Karsh's lifelong ambition was to search for a form within a
    face, one that could become a symbol for a life that was purposeful,
    meaningful, and generally virtuous. "I speak with some experience when
    I say that I have rarely left the company of accomplished men and
    women without feeling that they had in them real sincerity,
    integrity--yes, and sometimes vanity of course--and always a sense of
    high purpose." In his 60-year career, Karsh seldom wavered from this
    goal, even when fame and fortune came his way. Neither did he discard
    his trademark variations in lighting style that he perfected in the
    late 1940s while other fashions came and went. Unchanging, too, was
    his genius at capturing the revealing and ephemeral psychological
    expressions, those fleeting disclosures of character and purpose for
    which his famous sitters trusted him.

    Karsh was the preferred photographer of kings, queens, princes,
    presidents, prime ministers, generals, and other political figures
    because he rendered them with an unbiased and unfailing regard for
    their dignity. Karsh and the musicians, artists, writers, scientists,
    actors, and intellectuals he photographed shared a parallel ambition:
    to create works of art of lasting value. In making what now seem
    singular, monumental statements honoring those he considered his
    contemporary heroes, he stood alone in his field, so much so that it
    could be argued he was the last of his kind.

    Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes is organized by the Art Institute of
    Chicago. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated
    catalogue, written by exhibition curator David Travis, former Curator
    of Photography at the Art Institute, and issued by Boston publisher
    David R. Godine. The 192-page book traces Karsh's artistic development
    and reassesses his place in the history of photography. It will be
    available in January 2009 and can be purchased at the Art Institute's
    Museum Shop.

    http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&i nt_new=28247
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