Wikipedia @ 25: Yousuf Karsh

To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

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Today’s random article: Karsh (crater)
Today’s topic: Yousuf Karsh

The planet Mercury is covered with impact craters, which isn’t surprising because it has no atmosphere to slow down incoming meteors nor significant active tectonic or erosion processes to conceal them once they’re created. In 2015 the IAU ran a competition to name four such craters: the winning entries resulted in the naming of the craters Carolan, Enheduanna, Kulthum, Rivera, and Karsh.

This crater is named after Yousuf Karsh, who’s sufficiently famous that I’d actually heard of him, which was an unusual result from hitting “random article” on Wikipedia.

But in case you don’t know who Yousaf Karsh is – or if, like me, you just wanted to learn more about him – then you’re in luck!

Yousuf Karsh was an Canadian-Armenian photographer who took principally portrait photographs, some of which you’ve almost-certainly seen already. He photographed a huge number of famous and significant individuals of the 20th century. Like this one:

That photo, taken in 1941, is titled The Roaring Lion, and it’s got a story to it.

Winston Churchill posed for his photograph on his way out from delivering the “some chicken! some neck!” speech to the Canadian parliament (you can see his notes from the speech tucked into his jacket pocket). He had his trademark cigar in his mouth, but Karsh wanted it gone. He asked Churchill to remove it, but Churchill refused, and Karsh went ahead to take the photograph anyway. But then at the last second, Karsh said “Forgive me, sir” and snatched the cigar directly out of the Prime Minister’s mouth.

“By the time I got back to the camera, he looked so belligerent, he could have devoured me,” said Karsh later, of the expression on Churchill’s face. But it’s that expression that he captured with the camera, and that would go on to be described by the USC as a “defiant and scowling portrait [which] became an instant icon of Britain’s stand against fascism.” Absolutely iconic.

Churchill himself said, after the picture was taken, that “you can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed.” Hence the portrait’s name.

Or how about this picture of the Marx Brothers in 1948:

Or how about this fantastic photo of the then Princess Elizabeth, aged 21 or 22, before her accession as Queen Elizabeth II:

Here’s some things I didn’t know about Yousuf Karsh, though:

Being born to ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire could have been a death sentence in itself for young Yousuf. Ottoman and later Turkish Nationalist authorities and paramilitaries deported, confined, or murdered hundreds of thousands and quite possibly over a million Armenians, who they saw as a threat to their national identity (among other candidate causes).

Karsh and his family travelled with a Kurdish caravan to Aleppo in Syria in 1922, and a year later his parents took advantage of a humanitarian scheme to transport displaced Armenians to live with relatives in Canada: the then 15-year-old who “spoke little French, and less English” and “had no money and little schooling” moved half way around the world to live with his uncle.

Yousuf’s uncle was a photographer and taught him the essentials of early-20th-century photography technology and techniques, before sending him to apprentice in Boston under John H. Garo, a fellow Armenian whose studio hosted the still-running Boston Camera Club. He worked in the USA for a time then returned to Canada, opening his own studio in 1932. When his brother Malak was able to join him in Canada in 1937, Yousuf helped Malak break into a career in photography too: a career that would probably have been better-known were it not for being in the shadow of his older brother!

I don’t know whether he’d care about having a crater named after him or not. But he’d probably have been more proud of the legacy that lives on in the Karsh Award, given every alternate year by the City of Ottawa for outstanding artistic work in a photo-based medium.