Este é mais um daqueles casos em que a obra esmaga o artista. Neste caso concreto, todos conhecem a fotografia mas poucos conseguirão identificar ou nomear o seu autor.
E, no entanto, é um dos mais consagrados – e conseguidos – retratistas da história da fotografia contemporânea.
Yousuf Karsh (ou Josuf, ou Hovsep na versão original) nasceu na Arménia, na cidade de Mardin, actualmente parte da Turquia.
A infância foi passada nos horrores da fome e da deportação massiva das minorias Arménias residentes no, então, Império Otomano. A própria família de Karsh sofreu no corpo e na alma, assim recordados –
“I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village.”
A rota de fuga levou a família à Síria e, posteriormente, ao Canadá. Iniciou os estudos de fotografia e, em 1928, rumou a Boston como aluno de John Garo, um fotógrafo retratista americano, também de origem arménia. Regressou ao Canadá em 1931, primeiro como assistente de John Powls e, a partir de 1933, com o seu próprio estúdio.
A eternidade bateu-lhe à porta no dia 30 de Dezembro de 1941 quando fotografou Winston Churchill, na Casa dos Comuns de Ottawa, onde tinha acabado de discursar. A fotografia foi capa da Life Magazine e é uma das imagens mais reproduzidas de todos os tempos.
E, no entanto, está longe de ser o único retrato de Karsh de que o mundo se apropriou. Basta ver como os retratos de Hemingway, Einstein, Eisenhower, Bogart, Grace Kelly, Martha Graham, Pablo Casals, Picasso, Madre Teresa e tantos outros, nos transmitem uma sensação de familiaridade.
Como curiosidade, das 100 pessoas mais notáveis do século XX, nomeadas pela International Who’s Who, Karsh retratou 51. Ele próprio constava dessa lista e era, aliás, o único canadiano.
Aqui fica uma pequena amostra do trabalho de um grande fotógrafo.
My portrait of Winston Churchill changed my life. I knew after I had taken it that it was an important picture, but I could hardly have dreamed that it would become one of the most widely reproduced images in the history of photography. In 1941, Churchill visited first Washington and then Ottawa.
The maestro’s villa was a photographer’s nightmare, with his boisterous children bicycling through vast rooms already crowded with canvases.
I expected to meet in the author a composite of the heroes of his novels. Instead, in 1957, at his home Finca Vigía, near Havana, I found a man of peculiar gentleness, the shyest man I ever photographed – a man cruelly battered by life, but seemingly invincible.
At Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, I found Einstein a simple, kindly, almost childlike man, too great for any of the postures of eminence. One did not have to understand his science to feel the power of his mind or the force of his personality.
As the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, Eisenhower appeared confident and imperturbable, a man certain of his course. Having witnessed intimately the tragedy of war, he still had strong faith and trust in mankind. When he saw a print of this photograph, he wrote to me of his “belief that through universal understanding and knowledge there is some hope that order and logic can gradually replace chaos and hysteria in the world.”
I photographed (Ali) in 1970, as part of a series of young people for ‘Look’ Magazine… Muhammad Ali arrived at my New York studio with a breathless young editor trailing behind. They had jogged together from the ‘Look’ offices, the young editor carrying Ali’s heavy portable telephone which Ali said kept him in “constant contact with the world.”
At the residence of the Archbishop of Ottawa, Mother Teresa was an honored guest. It was one stop on an exhausting fundraising tour for her order of compassionate nursing sisters, who minister to the world’s poorest and neediest. She was a diminutive, fiercely independent, single-minded whirlwind amid a sea of solicitous well-wishers who had scheduled her every moment.
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