Jawaharlal Nehru December 22, 1956

In the aftermath of the upheaval and violence of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations to foster diplomatic dialogue, Karsh’s portraits of world leaders collectively envision an aspirational future world of peaceful coexistence among nations and among peoples. A significant example is Karsh’s portrayal of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, nearly ten years after the country gained independence from Britain.

In this portrait, Nehru is posed in near profile, with hands clasped, gazing contemplatively away from the camera. A soft diffusion of light surrounds his figure. With this work, Karsh pays tribute to Nehru’s leadership during the 1947 Partition, which established India as a secular republic emancipated from British rule and Pakistan as an Islamic state. The portrait sitting took place in Washington, D.C., in 1956, after Nehru’s meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower to secure American support for peaceful diplomacy in addressing the Suez Crisis, an Arab–Israeli conflict implicating global superpowers.

Karsh was unparalleled in his time as a portrait photographer with access to diplomats and political figures. He photographed Eisenhower on multiple occasions: as Second World War battle commander, as president of the United States, and finally, as a retired statesman in 1966. On this last occasion, Karsh portrays Eisenhower in the office of his presidential library, standing with his hand placed on an enormous globe. But Eisenhower does not rest his extended arm on the globe for support so much as he exerts influence upon it, his hand conspicuously poised above North America. Like Nehru’s, Eisenhower’s gaze is contemplative, his eyes downcast, a performance of gravitas in facing the geopolitical precarity of a world armed with nuclear weapons.

One of the key figures in the Suez Crisis was Canada’s foreign minister, and later prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his role in mediating the crisis and proposing the deployment of the United Nations Emergency Force. Karsh personally witnessed Pearson’s attendance in the House of Commons to receive congratulations from his parliamentary peers. Later, he restaged the scene with Pearson posed in profile, notes in hand, and Speaker of the House Roland Michener and a parliamentary page lit dramatically to the left.

Considered together, Karsh’s portraits of Nehru, Eisenhower, and Pearson demonstrate his remarkable ability to envision unique, iconic portrayals of political leadership. While each of the figures—who share a historical moment—is presented as a thoughtful leader seeking a peaceful future, Karsh’s visual cues define their different perspectives: for Nehru, non-violent activism; for Eisenhower, strategic military dominance; for Pearson, persistent dialogue.

The portrait of Nehru is also significant because Karsh was singular among his peers in seeking to represent the cultural and racial diversity of the world he lived in. In his early portrait studio sittings in the 1930s, he photographed people of colour despite official and unofficial policies of racial segregation and discrimination. Karsh’s portrayal of Nehru expresses his own world view, one formed from his childhood experience as a survivor of persecution during the Armenian Genocide and his later experience as an ethnic outsider when he was admitted to Canada in 1924 as an exception to the prohibition against so-called Asiatic immigrants. With his heavy Arabic accent and olive complexion, Karsh was certainly regarded as “other” in 1930s Ottawa society. He understood well the challenge of difference, as did Nehru, who had spent many of his formative years living outside India in the United Kingdom.