Style & Technique

Yousuf Karsh’s signature style was the hallmark of modernist photography for much of the twentieth century: dramatic lighting, minimalist settings, sharp focus, and rich, velvety prints. For the public, a single frame from a portrait sitting would become an iconic image. But a Karsh portrait was carefully constructed, never simply “snapped”—the result of numerous artistic and technical decisions, from initial booking through to final printing. His mastery of photography spanned tremendous shifts in technology, from natural light to artificial illumination and from glass-plate negatives to film photography using large-format and small portable cameras. The end of Karsh’s era of formal portraiture using film photography coincided with the rise of self-made digital images created with smartphone cameras.

The Portrait Sitting

Under the tutelage of John H. Garo (1868–1939), which ended in 1931, Karsh mastered the photographic styles and techniques of soft-focus Pictorialism. He photographed using natural light with a large bellows camera anchored on a tripod, taking exposures on cumbersome and fragile 14 x 17-inch or 16 x 20-inch glass negatives. By the time he opened his Ottawa studio in early 1933, Karsh had embraced a modernist portrait style that aligned with his generation. His work demonstrated an awareness of the sharp focus delineation that characterized work by American contemporaries such as Edward Steichen (1879–1973), Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), Edward Weston (1886–1958), and Ansel Adams (1902–1984).

Karsh used a variety of photographic equipment and materials, but most of his portraits were made using a large-format camera. Working with this camera, he could produce high-resolution, large-format exposures on 8 x 10-inch film negatives from which multiple prints of various sizes could be made. Though Karsh used lightweight Rolleiflex cameras for photojournalism assignments and personal photography, he rarely used them for formal portrait sessions.

An even more significant shift was Karsh’s mastery of the dramatic potential of artificial lighting, which was already well established in theatre and cinema productions, as well as in the stylish portraits of movie stars featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair. As Lilly Koltun astutely observed, Karsh’s experience working with theatre directors and their casts during the 1930s went far beyond expanding his technical skills. By detaching the expressive potential of illumination from the limitations of natural light, Karsh was able to assume directorial control and invoke an otherworldly dimension in his portraits, such as his portrayal of playwright and actor Madge Macbeth in 1936, creating psychologically impactful images that were pictorially distinct from the realm of the everyday.

During a typical photo session, Karsh’s key light was placed slightly behind and about one and a half metres to the right of the camera. This provided the main illumination, modelling the sitter’s features and establishing the essential light and shade pattern of the image. He always positioned two light sources behind his subject on both sides—to act as either fill or rim lights—which resulted in light bouncing off the side of the subject’s face and toward the camera. By gently illuminating shadows, the fill light reduced the extreme contrasts produced by the main light. This made details in dark areas more visible in the final image. The ground-glass screen of the camera back showed Karsh the exact view captured by the lens (appearing upside down), allowing him to frame and focus with precision. To block ambient light, Karsh viewed the image under a heavy velvet cloth and ensured that all necessary lighting and camera adjustments were ready, and that the portrait subject was ideally posed.

Karsh was meticulous in his advance research of his portrait subjects, particularly those who were in the public eye and especially those with restricted schedules, such as heads of government. Each shot was based on planning and previsualization to ensure a portrait that was both compositionally effective and psychologically insightful. The sitter’s pose and environmental factors such as lighting and the selection of props were carefully considered even before Karsh and his subject formally met.

Especially in the early years of operating his portrait studio, Karsh tested aesthetic and technical approaches to increase his confidence in directing the portrait session. For example, his future wife, Solange Gauthier, posed with a stuffed dog in preparation for a portrait sitting with Lady Anne Elizabeth Clark, wife of British High Commissioner Sir William Henry Clark, and her dog, Angus, in August 1934. This early portrait demonstrates the strong perfectionism that compelled Karsh to plan in advance, enhance each portrait environment, whether in the studio or on location, and lead each session with confidence. By contrast, Karsh’s 1936 Woman in a Turban (Betty Low) was created for circulation in prestigious photographic salons in a playful, unpremeditated moment. Karsh had spontaneously draped a window curtain around his sitter, friend and model Betty Low, resulting in a dramatic study evocative of classical art.

In the studio, Karsh ultimately made a reputation for himself as a thoughtful auteur. In addition to his careful attention to technical aspects, his focus on the person before him was absolute. Sitters felt the strong pull of Karsh’s attention, especially as he became a celebrity, a lesson he learned well from Garo. The portrait session involved negotiation—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—between performer and director to achieve a compelling final image. As one client, a young debutante who sat for him in the 1930s, remarked, “I recall that Karsh had a gentle manner but was very busy setting up various poses. He would come over and move my foot or my arm into position, and then return to his camera, and with a cloth over his head, he would have a look at me. He took about six pictures in total and my family was pleased with the results.”

As an experienced portraitist, Karsh drew upon a broad repertoire of compositions in the planning and execution of a portrait sitting. He typically shot many exposures and sometimes alternated the poses of the sitter in each session, then he selected the best images when viewing the first contact prints.

Setting and Symbolism

The force of the sitter’s personality was established not only through pose and lighting but also through striking backdrops and props used to convey a sitter’s talent, profession, or social position. Karsh often used visual cues as aids to an interesting composition and as symbolic objects to help his audiences recognize famous personalities. For instance, Ambassador Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the sister of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, gracefully poses at the edge of a polished round table. Pandit headed the Indian diplomatic delegations to the United Nations and served as India’s ambassador to several countries, and Karsh’s portrayal suggests that she casts her influence across the globe. Similarly, Karsh’s portraits of composers and musicians frequently feature the artists posed with their instruments or actually playing them, such as a 1956 portrait of Igor Stravinsky, a proponent of modern atonal composition, seated at his piano as if taking a momentary pause during a composition session.

In another memorable portrait, Robert Oppenheimer, who was instrumental in the creation of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, is shown with pipe in hand, paused before two blackboards covered in scientific formulas. At the time of this sitting, the controversial physicist had had his security clearance revoked for his post-war opposition to nuclear weapons. Karsh’s vantage point in setting up the portrait also captures, ironically, a small sign placed to protect the work in progress: “Do Not Erase.”

Though Karsh endeavoured to create each image as a unique tribute to the individual, he acknowledged there was a limit, particularly in view of a career that produced more than fifteen thousand sittings:

But I cannot always avoid some duplication, and I think that it would be wrong if I were to endeavour to do so. Thus, I have at times repeated a composition or duplicated an arrangement where I have felt that this was natural. But I have done it with full awareness; as long as I can feel that I am conscious of such decisions, neither repetition nor freshness of composition will become ends in themselves, nor do I think they should.

The iconic significance of a portrait was also grounded in Karsh’s respect for the individual’s gift and in his belief in a modern society founded on meritocracy, a conviction for which he himself was an exemplar. Karsh was acutely sensitive to posing his subjects so that the resulting portrait embodied their aspirations and achievements, as well as the public’s perception of them.

Like many portrait photographers past and present, Karsh developed a signature approach that depended on consistently applied aesthetic choices across the breadth of his practice. Successful because of his established hallmark style, Karsh sought to optimize the possibilities of lighting, pose, and setting during each portrait occasion. He regarded the resulting image not only as intrinsically artistic but also as important evidence of a creative moment between himself and his sitter, an ineffable fragment of time distilling the photographer’s unique sensitivity as a perceptive observer guiding the camera’s mechanical eye.

In the Darkroom

Although Karsh is celebrated for his entertaining anecdotes of portrait sittings with the luminaries of his time, and while he boldly shared his photographic method with the eager readers of his 1962 biography, In Search of Greatness, he closely guarded the mysteries of his back-of-house aesthetic and technical choices.

In the darkroom, exposed film was immersed in a chemical developer to produce a negative image from which multiple positive prints could be made on photo-sensitive paper. In Karsh’s time, most photographers tracked the development of the negative by carefully monitoring the immersion time and the temperature of the solution, but Karsh had mastered the ability to judge it by visual inspection under a dim safelight.

For most of his career, Karsh produced reference prints known as “red proofs” that required exposure to daylight but no further processing. He used these to examine each exposure, select negatives for printing, and mark faults for correction on the original negative, as seen in the red proof and negative of his 1965 portrait of Christl Thalhammer (shown with the film emulsion side up to reveal the retouching marks). Working on the developed negative, Karsh and his assistants then used various techniques and tools to correct flaws or create visual effects. For example, they would darken areas of a negative to produce more intense highlights in a sitter’s hair when the tonalities were reversed in the finished positive print.

To create finished, museum-quality prints, the portraits were exposed on special printing paper under the light of an enlarger. Karsh developed photographs on Opal V paper, a textured Kodak product that produced a rich, velvety finish, sometimes compared to suede. He would select specific developers, papers, and toners to emphasize warm or cool tones in the final print. Other critical decisions came into play in this phase of production to determine size, tonal contrast, cropping, finish, and placement of the artist’s signature. Final prints were delivered to the sitter, displayed in a gallery, or published.

Over the course of his long career, Karsh created hundreds of thousands of negatives, transparencies, and prints from approximately fifteen thousand portrait sittings. Unlike many notable photographers of the twentieth century, such as Edward Weston, who directed that his negatives be destroyed after his death in the belief that only the prints were true expressions of his artistic vision, Karsh saw his archive as a wellspring for creating future fine art prints and reproductions of his celebrated portraits. When his comprehensive collection was acquired by the National Archives of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada) in 1987, Karsh included his negatives and red proofs along with his annotations on sitting envelopes and the negatives for montage printing. This decision to reveal his artistic choices was significant, as it supports ongoing research into his working methods and sheds light on the critical decisions involved in transforming a portrait from camera lens to final print.

Karsh in Colour

From the 1940s onward, Karsh occasionally departed from his trademark dramatic and minimalist black-and-white portrayals in favour of lush colour-film photography and colour-separation commercial printing. Although black-and-white photography was considered essential in elite fine art photography circles, Karsh’s commissions for illustrated magazines often required highly saturated portraits.

An early example of Karsh working with colour film is his 1947 portrait of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Karsh had photographed King on several formal and informal occasions. In 1947, he posed the Canadian prime minister with the Peace Tower of the Parliament Buildings visible through the window. A prolific diarist, King reflected on the sitting later that day, noting that Karsh initially worked with black-and-white film before switching to colour, taking about fifty exposures in all: “Once or twice, in photographing, Karsh made the significant remark that he wanted to get the picture of me that I would like to be remembered by. I can see that, from different sides, people have in their minds, that my public career and perhaps life itself may be drawing nearer to a close.” King’s observation confirms Karsh’s long-range view of portraits as immortalizing the subject. Images from this sitting were reproduced in Maclean’s magazine and featured in King’s impending political campaign. After King’s death three years later, Karsh’s portrait was used as the basis of a commemorative stamp in 1951.

Karsh was frequently commissioned to take colour portraits of Hollywood stars for reproduction in magazines. In 1956, he photographed Swedish actor Anita Ekberg in Los Angeles, California. Ekberg lived and worked mostly in Italy and is best remembered for her starring role as Sylvia in Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960). When photographing cinematic femmes fatales, Karsh generally emphasized their sexual allure, and the choice of sumptuously chromatic film enhanced the viewer’s sensory experience.

Karsh, a devout Catholic throughout his life, photographed church leaders and published collections that included lavish colour photographs depicting individuals and ceremonies in volumes such as This Is the Mass (1958), This Is Rome (1959), and These Are the Sacraments (1962). Although Karsh photographed ecclesiastical portraits using both black-and-white and colour film, the colour versions enhanced the rich reds associated with the ceremonial robes and the theatrical spectacle of spiritual rituals. Karsh’s iconic 1949 portrait of Pope Pius XII, posed in reverential prayer, conflates the mortal with the divine and does not hint at the controversial legacy of Pius’s action and inaction during the Second World War. The single colour transparency was reproduced as fifty thousand lithographs commissioned by the Vatican for distribution to parishes around the world.

Karsh worked in colour mainly to meet the demands of the publishing market. Although he did create acclaimed portraits using colour film, it was not his preference. As he remarked in 1962, “Even though I had done a great deal of colour portraiture, I do not think there are many colour photographs that provide true artistic satisfaction. Too much of the mechanical element must always be involved; it is not possible—at least not yet—for the photographer to be in full control of the process, rather, he is likely to be its servant.… When the colour picture succeeds, nothing is left for the imagination of the viewer.”

Karsh understood the public demand—created and nourished by major publications—for proximity to cherished idols through gazing upon their lifelike, albeit pictorial, presences. He also understood the technical demands in the translation and transmission of his colour portraits for mass circulation. Although he accepted colour portrait commissions, Karsh did so sparingly, aware of the stigma of commercialization that they would accrue from fine art circles. His preference, by training and temperament, was to create a less “real” but more psychologically “true” portrait afforded by an infinite monochrome palette.

Experimentation

Although Karsh had crafted his signature approach to commissioned studio portraits and portraits of famous figures, his interest in exploring the creative possibilities of camera-based art persisted. As the demands of his studio commitments, international travel, and publishing projects grew, it became a challenge to find time for self-directed expression. Karsh’s exploration of straight photography, montage, and surrealism attests to his keen awareness of contemporary experimentation.

Karsh trained in the soft focus of late Pictorialism, whose adherents, including his mentor, John H. Garo, created photographs with a painterly look, often referencing allegorical or classical themes. As he established his own portrait practice in the 1930s, Karsh worked in the prevailing style of sharp-focus straight photography. This approach gained popular appeal from several directions: his modernist contemporaries of the New Objectivity movement in Germany; illustrated magazines featuring glamorous portraits of Hollywood movie stars; and American photographers exploring the aesthetic possibilities of everyday objects, plants and vegetables, industrial machines, and innovative architecture of the period.

Karsh’s first visit to New York City in 1936 left an indelible impression of both the accelerated pace of life and the scale of the built environment of a huge metropolis. In 1940, he created a tabletop tableau composed of drinking straws that uncannily resembled towering skyscrapers. The title of this experimental work, City of Straws, 1940, is typical of the ennobling and allegorical titles that art photographers often gave to still-life subjects of the period. The vertiginous perspective of the camera and the variation in the heights of the straws link Karsh to contemporary photographers working in the straight style to create dramatic portraits of real New York City streets, such as Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), who worked under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration.

Although most modern photographers preferred the so-called straight print, or direct print, of a single negative, Karsh occasionally combined negatives to create a single composition. By using multiple images to form a final print, Karsh was able to create ideal lighting conditions for both figure and background before merging them. He used this technique extensively in his industrial and commercial photography but also occasionally in his portrait photography when existing backgrounds were inadequate.

He also experimented with combination printing to achieve special effects, as he had done in his print Elixir, 1938. In 1945, Karsh photographed celebrated Canadian actor, playwright, and director Gratien Gélinas. He depicts the founder and lead player of the popular Quebec revue Les Fridolinades as the everyman anti-hero surrounded by his own gesturing hands, a composition based on several negatives. The composite image suggests the character is being tormented by the winged creatures flying about him.

Karsh experimented with optics and surrealist distortions as well, but this was limited to his personal work rather than paid commissions. In a 1956 self-portrait, Karsh set up his newly acquired large-format Calumet camera along a garden path facing a mirrored orb. Several surrealist tropes are present in this self-portrait: the figure of the photographer is fused with that of his mechanical instrument; it is self-referential, in that both the portrait maker and his subject are present in the mirrored reflection; and the fish-eye distortion prevents the illusion of depth of a vanishing point perspective.

Although Karsh had little time for creative experimentation, his occasional departures demonstrate his awareness of and interest in other photographic genres, giving expression to a playful dimension in his work.

After Karsh

As Karsh approached the final years of his practice, younger artists exploring portraiture began to extend his distinctive style while also questioning the nature of the portrait itself as a fusion of revelation and concealment, direct observation, and constructed fiction.

Karsh’s signature classicism can be traced in the work of New York–based Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), whose still-life, nude, and portrait photographs are linked by an emphasis on an austere, dramatic, hard-edged minimalism. Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Canadian actor Donald Sutherland features intense light illuminating the actor’s face and his wary gaze addressing ours. This intensity echoes Karsh’s approach to close-up portraiture, particularly the theatrical impact created by the dramatic lighting in his portrait of another Canadian actor, Christopher Plummer.

With the advent of postmodernist practices during the 1980s, many artists began to decode and reimagine the history of art. Critical to this perspective was an interrogation of the premises of classical portraiture itself: character revealed through facial expression, the authenticity of identity, and the purported portrayal of truth.

In contrast to Karsh’s quest for the ultimate singular portrait to define personality, Canadian artist Arnaud Maggs (1926–2012) explored portraiture as a sequence of images. In the series 48 Views, Maggs depicts his sitters—including Yousuf Karsh—in the manner of police mug shots, directing them to turn toward the camera, and then to the side 48 times. Each frame represents an exact moment in time and is placed within a grid of 48 images. In viewing the resulting “quilt” formed from dozens of nearly identical portraits, the viewer oscillates between perceiving the multitude of parts and desiring to create a continuous and coherent picture.

Japanese conceptual artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto (b.1948) examines the practice of formal portraiture in his Portraits series, 1994–99. Sugimoto’s photographs of historical figures are based on subjects from Madame Tussauds’s wax museum. Sugimoto “poses” his sitters, such as Cuban president Fidel Castro, in studio conditions reminiscent of Karsh’s style to achieve portraits of sitters who are undeniably famous, yet also inanimate representations of a living figure. Karsh’s earlier portrait of Castro is a representation of a living sitter, accorded an authenticity based on Karsh’s aesthetic choices, his prestige as a portraitist, and his first-person account of the sitting. Sugimoto disrupts these conventions in his photographic portrayal of a wax figure, provoking an unsettling tension between visual perception and intellectual understanding, and prompting viewers to question how they project and perceive authenticity in the constructed spectacle of personality.

Karsh’s signature style was the hallmark of modernist photography for much of the twentieth century: dramatic lighting, minimalist settings, sharp focus, and rich, luscious prints. The end of his era of formal portraiture created using film photography coincides with the rise of self-made digital images taken with smartphone cameras. But the so-called memeification of Yousuf Karsh during the first two decades of the twenty-first century has spawned websites dedicated to creating new portraits that pay homage to the master image maker. Browsing crowdsourced media platforms such Flickr and Vimeo reveals content creators exploring Karsh’s approach and sharing their results, as well as the mechanisms they use to generate Karsh-style portraits through artificial intelligence.

Through these acts of emulation and interpretation, play and experimentation, Karsh’s method of portraiture continues to inspire dynamic engagement. His approach not only endeavours to capture the essence of the individual but also places that individual within the broader context of the social collective. Portraiture, as a blend of vulnerability and performance—expressing both self and of others—remains a potent catalyst for fostering conversation and connection.