Learning Resources
Explore the following collections to learn more about Karsh’s life, portraits, and photographic equipment:
Portrait Gallery of Canada
Library and Archives Canada has collected portraits since its founding in 1872. The Portrait Gallery of Canada, a program of Library and Archives Canada, is responsible for these portraiture collections.
The Yousuf Karsh Fonds, held by Library and Archives Canada, offers researchers a comprehensive view of Karsh’s life and achievements through primary sources. Library and Archives Canada acquired the Fonds between 1987 and 1998. The Fonds consists of over 350,000 negatives, photographic prints, and transparencies representing Karsh’s creative output between 1932 and 1992. It also includes business papers, publishing projects, art work, personal correspondence, scrapbooks, awards and honours, and recorded interviews.
Visit the Karsh research resources available at Library and Archives Canada:
Canada Science and Technology Museum
The Canada Science and Technology Museum holds 385 pieces of Yousuf Karsh’s photographic equipment including lights, cameras, dark room equipment, and retouching accessories. This “Karsh of Ottawa collection” includes nine cameras used by Karsh since the 1940s, complete with lenses, tripods, and filters. The Museum also holds lighting units, which Karsh considered to be the most essential technology in his studio. The “Karsh of Ottawa collection” even includes the crock in which Karsh mixed the ingredients for his gold toner.
In the 1960s, Karsh maintained three sets of photographic equipment — one set was kept in his Ottawa studio, a second set was stored in New York, and a third set was kept in London. The artifacts now held by the Canada Science and Technology Museum were used in Karsh’s Ottawa and New York studios from the 1940s until 1992. Many of these items travelled with him around the world.
Visit Karsh research resources at the Canada Science and Technology Museum:
Karsh Estate
Visit the official site of photographer Yousuf Karsh, a multimedia retrospective of his life and work - photographs, news, exhibitions and a bibliography:
Karsh in the Classroom
Yousuf Karsh was one of the world’s most prominent portrait photographers. He launched his career in the 1930s volunteering with the Ottawa Little Theatre (OLT), in Ottawa, Canada. It was through his involvement at the OLT that he familiarized himself with the use of gestures, staging and theatrical lighting to create drama and intrigue in his portraits.
Before taking a photograph, Karsh would make many decisions that impacted the kind of message he conveyed. The learning resources in this section are meant to give students the necessary tools to decode images. These are not lesson plans, but rather starting points to inspire teachers to use Karsh photographs and ideas of visual literacy in their classrooms. Each resource includes some background information about the photograph and the theme (lighting, focus, props and drama) and a high resolution version of the photograph. Karsh in the Classroom suggests two or three simple ideas to implement in the classroom and get students thinking about the images they see everyday.
MARY OF SCOTLAND, DOMINION DRAMA FESTIVAL, 1937
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