By Karen Aagaard

Yousuf Karsh: Self-portrait. Ford Motor Company of Canada Collection.

Several kilometres north-west of the city’s limits, we encountered something we hadn’t been expecting. Families shuffling around in coordinating Gore-Tex jackets, frail-looking couples clutching crumpled museum maps, and a few Pretty Young Things looking…surprised. In fact, everyone looked just a little surprised.

There, in Kleinburg, Ontario, an hour away from Toronto’s acronymic attractions, we found ourselves in slack-jawed awe of the portraits propped up before us. Sure, we’d heard of Yousuf Karsh before, but for all we thought we knew of the Armenian-born photographer, our “new” impressions of his work trumped all our old preconceptions. Indeed, the McMichael’s two-part Karsh exhibition (“’Karshed’: Yousuf Karsh Selected Portraits” and “Yousuf Karsh: Industrial Images“) revealed a world of fleeting moments—captioned by the late photographer himself. Through this juxtaposition—of Karsh’s images with his own words—the observer can’t help but see the subject a little more clearly through the photographer’s eyes; Karsh’s eloquent, written appraisals of his subjects help to “anchor” his photographs (or so Barthes would say). His asides provide the context that most captions fail to deliver: the observer really does walk away from each portrait with a better understanding of both the subject and photographer.

Yousuf Karsh: Ernest Hemingway, 1957. Estate of Yousuf Karsh.

But back to the photographs themselves. Judging from the tight, single-file line that snaked from the first “Karshed” portrait to the thirtieth (and last), it was clear that this portion of the exhibit was the real crowd-pleaser. Hemingway, Einstein, Warhol, Churchill—every face on the wall was familiar. And yet there was something we hadn’t seen—or simply didn’t recognize—in each portrait. These celebrities looked…human; Karsh rarely captured (or, at least, framed) “God-like” moments.
Just one room over from “Karshed,” the late photographer’s “Industrial Images” collection drew a slightly (and we really do mean slightly) thinner crowd. Although Karsh’s subject matter—industrial workers on the job—had changed, his methodology remained the same: he refused to remove his subjects from their contexts. By allowing his models the freedom of, well, doing what they always do, he immortalized what was second-nature to them. And the result? These workers (from the Ford Motor Company of Canada, Atlas Steel in Welland, Ontario, and Pennsylvania’s Sharon Steel) looked just as poised, just as vulnerable, and just as real as the celebrities on the wall next door.

Yousuf Karsh: Kenneth “Tiny” Stirtzinger, Atlas Steels, 1950. Library and Archives Canada.