Daniel Makokis, Edmonton 1952

By the early 1950s, Karsh’s reputation as a portrait photographer was firmly established, largely through the reproducibility of his work. He soon began receiving projects beyond those he could execute in his Ottawa studio. Karsh took this portrait of trapper and hunter Daniel Makokis, an Indigenous patient receiving medical treatment at the segregated Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, as part of a photo essay commission by Maclean’s magazine. It is a notable example of how Karsh’s portraits were so effectively distributed across multiple media channels, each with its own encoded way to encounter images. Each time a photograph was reproduced or exhibited, its meaning shifted to suit the new context.

The Makokis portrait, positioned on a page with two others taken by Karsh at the Camsell Hospital, first appeared in Maclean’s, in the December 15, 1952, issue, under the subtitle “The Children of the Frontier.” There, Karsh’s text described his visit to Camsell, warmly congratulated the staff, and empathized with the patients in their care. As an elderly man, Makokis was clearly not a “child” of the frontier, especially when contrasted with the two images of younger patients: this terminology was a way of indicating the subordinate status of Indigenous people in the care of the federal government.

Later, the Makokis portrait was chosen for display inside the Karsh Studio in Ottawa. The portrait is visible in a shot by Chris Lund (1923-1983), an acclaimed photographer for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). This photograph of the interior of Karsh’s studio was featured in the May 27, 1958, NFB photo story “Portrait of Karsh: Close-Up of a Celebrated Canadian.” Neither Karsh’s studio display nor its citation in the NFB photo story identify Makokis or indicate the original context of the photo, as the real subject of the story is Karsh himself.

Karsh’s printed portfolio Karsh Canadians (1978) featured the Makokis portrait along with the following text:

Daniel Makokis had been flown from the Saddle Lake Reserve to the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton for a cataract operation. Meeting him there, I was impressed by the stoic determination of an Indian who had come on a long journey, with all his worldly belongings in a sack, his near blindness indicated by a white cane. I photographed him because he seemed to embody the ancient spirit of his people. This is a portrait of humble endurance and quiet courage in a hard northern land.

In this account, written two decades after the portrait was taken, Karsh shares with the reader how he met Makokis and was moved by his resilience. By naming him and by transcribing their brief encounter, Karsh accords Makokis a place of recognition and respect on par with the other sitters selected for the volume, regarding him as a representative in his Canadian pantheon.

The emphasis on the individuality of the portrait’s subject was lost, however, in its subsequent appearance in the major exhibition and catalogue Karsh: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, organized by the International Center of Photography in New York, in 1983. As part of an artist retrospective shaped under the direction of the museum’s curatorial staff, the Makokis portrait represented Karsh’s foray into assignment photography, yielding remarkable images that could also be appreciated as fine art. The caption for the image as it appeared in the exhibition reads, “Indian Man, 1953: To an Edmonton hospital he brought all of his worldly belongs wrapped in a knapsack, his name on a label, and a worn white cane.” This change in accompanying text resulted in the erasure of the subject’s personal name and his treatment and recovery at a hospital far from his home community, as well as evidence of Karsh’s interaction with him prior to the exposure of the camera’s shutter. The portrait that had begun as a magazine assignment before shifting to a subsequent context as art portraiture was now reduced to a vague ethnography.

Karsh demonstrates a rare moment of affinity with photographers working outside the portrait studio through comparison with New York street photographs by Paul Strand (1890–1976) and images of displaced families by Depression-era documentarian Dorothea Lange (1895–1965). As psychology is exchanged for physiognomy, individual name for descriptive label, the subject’s face becomes aesthetic terrain.