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Yousuf Karsh
Industrial Portraits featuring Ford of Canada, Windsor, 1951
To August 29th, 2004
Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario

Reviewed by Chris Roberts

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) is Canada’s best-known photographic artist. Born to Armenian parents in eastern Turkey, Karsh fled Ottoman persecution, first to Syria in 1922 and then to Canada in 1925. Karsh’s father (a successful merchant) was devoutly Roman Catholic, and his educated mother Protestant; his parents originally destined him for the priesthood.  Karsh became fascinated by photography, however, and after apprenticing in Boston, he returned to Canada in 1931 aspiring to photograph the illustrious figures of his era.

The Art Gallery of Windsor’s exhibit of Karsh’s portraits is especially interesting, since his fame and life-work centred not around working-class subjects, but what Karsh referred to as ‘people of consequence’.  Karsh’s passion was capturing the animating force inhabiting the souls of statesmen, eminent thinkers and religious figures, a force he termed “the ‘inward power’. Karsh’s spiritual quest and photographic technique strived to render this quality of ‘greatness’, those exalted aspects of mind and soul and spirit revealed on the faces of his distinguished subjects. Karsh wasn’t exclusively fixated on the great, however. In early 1951, he accepted a Ford of Canada commission to photograph Windsor workers for use in Ford's annual reports and company advertising.  The two weeks he spent photographing Ford workers came amidst a similar photographic assignment at the Atlas Steel facilities in Welland, Ontario and Sharon Steel Limited in Pennsylvania.

The photographs romantically depict workers in shimmering light and beautifully-lit workplaces, Karsh’s careful technique giving his figures a luminous and heroic quality. The exhibit is perhaps most interesting, however, for the context for Karsh’s images. Between May 1950 and December 1951, historian David Fraser describes “an on-again off-again in-plant war” at Ford’s, peaking in the discharge of 26 workers (including 13 stewards and committeemen) and a wildcat shutdown. In the years following the 1945 strike, management had adopted a conciliatory approach to the union, but the intensification of competition in the late 1940s prompted management to tighten discipline and restore management’s shopfloor authority. At the same time, in-plant union reps became more determined to circumvent the grievance procedure and confront shopfloor problems head-on.  In the early summer of 1950, a number of workplace actions and stoppages resulted in discharges.  That fall, Local 200 members rejected Ford management’s pressure for a five-year agreement, against the wishes of their local and regional leadership. Ongoing agitation during the subsequent wage negotiations led to accusations of sabotage from management, and a speed-up campaign conducted by management in July 1951 renewed months of confrontation, culminating in wildcats and discharge of 26 workers in December. In October 1951, Ford announced that assembly would be moved from Windsor to Oakville, where “the climate of capital” was healthier.

Given the turmoil, it’s fascinating to see Karsh’s beaming workers accompanied by confident descriptions of employee loyalty and spreading affluence. Karsh’s gaze was directed skyward, his attention undivided by the earthly realities before him, and this political and aesthetic vision, guided by Karsh's spirituality, is on full view at this exhibit. In his 1962 memoirs In Search of Greatness, Karsh recounts an old Armenian story in which a master shows his slave his image in a mirror, which the slave has never seen before. Said the master to his slave, “‘Look into this mirror, and you will see yourself as you are.” The slave did so; then broke into tears and sobbed. ‘What is wrong?’ said the master. Replied the slave, ‘I never knew how ugly I was.’  His master consoled him, ‘You have seen yourself but once.  I have been looking at you for years and I am not crying. In your face I have always seen the love and devotion which I treasure beyond price.  It is beauty to me: go and be at peace.’” •


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