Profile : Karsh Shifts Focus of His Career : At 84, Canada’s famous photographer crops out lucrative jobs and gives himself artistic license.

Last year, at the age of 83, Yousuf Karsh gave himself a present that few ever possess: the freedom to work at only what interests him.

And the work that interests the celebrated portrait photographer is that of capturing on film the stuff of fame. Karsh has been called “the last of the great heroic portrait photographers.” He is the photographer, more than any other, who through the mystical properties of silver nitrate has helped shape the way the Western World remembers people of consequence.

Karsh evoked the core of British wartime resolve in his extra-famous image of Winston Churchill, made during a remarkable two-minute sitting in the Parliament building here. He spent two days with a declining Ernest Hemingway in Cuba and came away with a disarmingly vulnerable head-on image of the Nobel laureate in a fisherman’s sweater, looking as if he had come down with a bad case of the human condition. He caught Albert Einstein looking skyward, humble, perhaps awe-struck.

Until last year, Karsh was accepting commercial assignments, placing discreet ads in the New Yorker magazine that told wealthy, if less noteworthy, potential customers that he was available in his studio at the Chateau Laurier, a grand old pile of a hotel here in the Canadian capital. His fees ran well into the thousands of dollars, but there was no want of takers.

Then, last June, he closed the studio. (Boris N. Yeltsin was his last customer, and Karsh says the Russian president wrapped up the sitting by telling him, “I would like you to remember: Winston Churchill started the Cold War, and I ended it.”)

Now, Karsh says, he fixes a lens only on the faces that interest him artistically, turning away all other business.

“We’ve been offered all kinds of fortunes since I closed the studio,” he says, sitting amid the splendor of a suite in the Chateau Laurier while a snowstorm rages outside. His cuffs are prominently monogrammed; his large cuff links, fashioned from museum-grade Greek coins, catch the soft glow of a table lamp. “I’ve declined.”

And so it is that Karsh devotes himself to gathering as many as possible of “these vital people who are leaving their mark on our culture today.” He spent the past year and a half traveling the United States, setting up his cameras before noted Americans in the arts, the sciences, politics and sports.

He didn’t photograph everybody he wanted--yes, some people are so busy they will turn down even a sitting with Yousuf Karsh--but portraits of the many with the simple good sense to accept Karsh’s proposal are now on exhibit at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art and in his latest album, “American Legends” (Little, Brown and Co., 156 pages).

What kind of person interests the portraitist, now that he is free to follow only his own tastes?

The likes of composer Stephen Sondheim, for instance; director-producer Harold Prince; actress Angela Lansbury, and author Tom Wolfe. Karsh was lucky enough to do a sitting with Jim Henson just weeks before his sudden death, and the resulting portrait shows the man behind the Muppets to have an unexpectedly somber, determined side. Karsh caught NBA legend Bob Cousy looking very much the latter-day Hamlet, contemplating a basketball in his hand in place of, alas, poor Yorick’s skull.

There is a surprisingly approachable Andy Warhol in the collection, a positively cherubic H. Norman Schwarzkopf in chocolate-chip “cammies” and a rum portrait of the architect I. M. Pei, dressed in an anything-but-post-modern mandarin tunic.

Is it difficult to get beneath the facades that such people have created for themselves? A defiant Karsh replies, “I photograph the legend. To hell with the person!”

But his wife and helpmate of 30 years, Estrellita, takes exception. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” she argues. “I think that it’s the person that you get, and that’s why people like to look at your. . . .”

“Well, you cannot afford but to get both the person and the legend,” Karsh concedes.

He goes on to tell of the sitting with Warhol that yielded the smiling, unfreakish portrait in the current collection. Warhol first took Karsh to lunch at The Factory, told lots of jokes and then took his picture.

By the time Karsh was ready to start on Warhol, he says, he was aware that he was photographing “many personalities in one. Because he was a good actor, he was a good painter, he was a good photographer. Now I had him in front of the camera, I had to divulge all that to the viewer. I had to put it all into one image.”

Though most of Karsh’s portraits suggest meticulous planning and lighting, the portraitist says that he goes into each sitting without preconceptions. However familiar the subject, however noteworthy the achievements, Karsh doesn’t settle on a means of presentation until he meets his subject face to face.

Usually, he gets to know his subjects in the hour or so that it can take his traveling assistant to set up lights and props.

“I do know a good deal about them before I meet them,” he says. “But what I want to do with them (comes) only after we have met, and have a few minutes’ discussion, or rapport.” When he and his subject then move on to the sitting room, he says, the final decisions about things like lighting are left to intuition.

There are in Karsh’s works many striking and evocative images of ordinary Canadians going about their lives in factories and on city streets. But Karsh is stirred by few populist passions. It has been his treatments of what he called “the faces of destiny” that have led to his own international fame. Human beings want to gaze into the faces of the famous, and Karsh is clear about why that is.

“It’s a sort of envy,” he says. “We admire someone because he happened to be the greatest prime minister in the 20th Century, Winston Churchill. We admire Hemingway because he was a Nobelist and an extraordinary, forthright person. They represent a certain measure of accomplishment that is (a source of) envy to the whole world.”

“Would you really say envy?” asks Estrellita. “Envy means you’re jealous and you begrudge them.”

“Even other writers would feel envious of the accomplishments of Hemingway,” Karsh reminds her. “You are a writer. You are envious of Hemingway.” (The Chicago-born Estrellita Karsh is, indeed, a medical writer and editor.)

Yousuf Karsh is not like photographer Diane Arbus; his work seems invariably to bring out the decency and heroism of his subjects. It has been suggested elsewhere that he possesses a hard-earned appreciation of the benevolent uses of power because he grew up a persecuted Armenian Christian in Muslim Turkey. Two of his uncles were killed by the Turks; an aunt was thrown down a well, though she survived the incident. As a child, Karsh himself was once stoned by Turkish youths who also stole his few simple playthings.

But Karsh acknowledges no special calling to capture only truth, beauty and justice in his viewfinder.

“I wouldn’t have minded photographing the most disapproved-of person in the world,” he says. “Because I’m a historian. I’m not a judge. I’m not a critic of character. I would photograph anyone--anyone, absolutely, without any reservation. It would be wonderful to have photographed some of these questionable characters throughout history.”

(Certainly Karsh has proved himself an equal-opportunity memorialist. His pantheon of more than 50,000 images includes Ottawa debutantes and Pope John XXIII, a string of American presidents, and Khrushchev, Castro and Tito.)

Does a person’s innate goodness or evil reveal itself in the human face? Karsh says that even after a lifetime’s work, he can’t be sure.

“When you look at the fatherly look of the Russian Stalin, well, he looked like a very likable uncle,” he says. “But he was sadistic. (With) many of these people, you can hardly discover by their appearance that they are threatening and dangerous to the world. That is what makes them so dangerous. They look kindly, but they are sadistic and vehement elements.”

Karsh came to Canada at 16, two years after his family left Turkey in the chaos of a mass, forced deportation. An uncle in Quebec took him in and saw in young Yousuf some promise as a photographer. He sent his nephew to work as an apprentice to the successful society photographer John Garo, a fellow Armenian with a studio in Boston.

In Boston, Karsh honed his understanding of light, experimented with the printing techniques of the day and--most important--developed the courtly, refined manner that to this day delights and relaxes subjects to the point where they can be photographed in natural poses.

Since Garo practiced his craft only with available light, he couldn’t take portraits after about 4 p.m. To fill his evenings, he turned one elaborate room off his studio into a literary salon, where he entertained ruling personalities from the theater, the opera and the world of letters. “It was an opportunity for me to listen to wise men and brilliant women conversing,” Karsh wrote in his 1962 autobiography, “In Search of Greatness.”

“Those were glorious afternoons and evenings, and I knew them to be so even at the time. Garo’s salon was my university, a noble institution at which to have been permitted to study.”

Better still, Garo’s studio was right across the street from the Boston Public Library. Karsh says that while his formal education consists of but a few semesters of schooling, he was able to spend long, satisfying hours reading in the library.

To this day, his advice to young photographers is to master not only the technical aspects of their craft but also to study history and biography--to learn as much as they can about the world they want to depict.

At 84, free from the constraints of his commercial operations, Karsh says he is now considering hiring a tutor, to help him complete his own education.

“I speak French very well, but want to go further with it,” he explains. “And history. I want to put all my inquisitiveness to this person, and let him worry about giving me the right answers.”

Gallery of Greats

ALBERT EINSTEIN (1948)

The scientist arrived at his sitting dressed in a simple, crew-necked sweater. The resulting portrait depicts him as such a humble, likable man that a whole new style was born. Karsh reports that when he went to photograph the cellist Pablo Casals, he found him “wearing a little sweater.” And Albert Schweitzer suggested wearing a sweater too. “Ever since Einstein’s picture, and even more since Hemingway’s, I have difficulty in persuading certain of my subjects not to wear sweaters,” Karsh wrote in his autobiography.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1957)

In 1957, Life magazine asked Karsh to photograph the writer in Havana. Acquaintances advised that to understand Hemingway, Karsh should sample his favorite drink, a daiquiri, at La Floridita bar. So, on his way to the first sitting, Karsh stopped at the bar--just as a pre-revolutionary gun battle broke out in the streets. Karsh took refuge on the barroom floor, drinking daiquiris in succession. He missed that first appointment. “Too much preparation took place,” Karsh laughs today.

WINSTON CHURCHILL (1941)

The British leader came to Ottawa just after the attack on Pearl Harbor to address Parliament. He was most annoyed to discover that someone had inserted a portrait sitting into his schedule and told Karsh he could take just one exposure. He refused to remove his cigar from his mouth, so just before squeezing the shutter release, Karsh reached out and snatched the stogie away. Churchill’s jaw tightened and his eyes blazed--translating onto film into the perfect wartime image of British indomitability.

Biography

* Name: Yousuf Karsh

* Title: Portrait photographer

* Personal: Armenian Christian raised in Turkey. Arrived in Canada at age 16. Went to Boston as an apprentice to society photographer John Garo. Self-educated at Boston Public Library. Has created more than 50,000 images. Emphasizes the decency and heroism of his subjects. Has a courtly, refined manner. Married for 30 years to wife Estrellita.

* Quote: “I photograph the legend. To hell with the person!”