Anna Magnani May 1, 1958

At many points during his long career, Karsh took care to photograph mature women with respect and dignity—as talented individuals with autonomy and agency in directing their lives. In his portrait of Italian actor Anna Magnani, Karsh creates psychic and compositional space for the assertion of her command as a performer who is resisting prevailing definitions of gender. Posed before Karsh in 1958, Magnani addresses the camera with a direct stare and bold frontal stance, cigarette in hand. Although a movie star, she does not wear feminine clothes, reveal her body, smile, or otherwise invite an admiring gaze.

Magnani, a celebrity of Italian neorealist cinema, was known for playing feisty working-class characters navigating the hardships of poverty, sexual politics, and political upheaval. Unlike the glamorous and polished American movie stars working on studio sets, Magnani dispensed with vanity, portraying extraordinary ordinary women in their everyday settings. Playwright Tennessee Williams (also photographed by Karsh) created the character of Serafina in The Rose Tattoo (1955) specifically for her. She received an Academy Award for Best Actress for the role, making her the first Italian—and first woman whose native language was not English—ever to win an Oscar.

For Karsh, the portrait sitting was a social and aesthetic act entwining the artist, the subject, and the eventual viewer. His portrait of Magnani visually frames his own experience of meeting the Italian actor and his respectful witness of Magnani’s assured conception of self.

This accordance of social—and ultimately, political—space can be located throughout Karsh’s oeuvre; for instance, in his 1977 portrait of poet, author, and activist Margaret Atwood, he shows her at her home, posed with a circular patchwork quilt radiating around her head like a mandala. Karsh later confessed that he “wondered if she would be as caustic and provocative as some of her books: on the contrary, as I soon found, she was as natural, friendly, and unassuming as her home.” Atwood smiles as she regards the camera with pencil in her hand and pages of a manuscript in her lap, her own books nearby. The placement of Atwood’s hand near her brooch creates the illusion that she is sweetly wielding a stiletto knife, a complement to her pencil, both weapons at the ready. As with the Magnani portrait, Karsh captures this instant as aesthetically optimal as a composition, but more significantly, it frames the individual’s performance of her social and political agency.