A century after his birth, a retrospective of the work of Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf karsh had only two minutes with winston churchill. Pausing for a session with the portrait photographer in December, 1941, Churchill grew impatient and looked at Karsh's camera "as he might regard the German enemy." Still, in that brief moment, Karsh captured Churchill, and all of England--a defiant island, fighting to the end. The image would make the Canadian photographer, who'd fled the Armenian genocide at the age of 14, an international sensation. Over the next six decades, until his death in 2002, Karsh had sittings with Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, Ronald Reagan, even the young Elizabeth Taylor. No matter who the subject, Karsh's stately, beautifully lit portraits never failed to catch a private essence of the world's most public people.