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 the camera "as he might regard the German enemy," Karsh later recalled. Still, in that brief moment, Karsh captured Churchill, and all of England—defiant, 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, he had sittings with Albert Einstein, Sophia Loren, Mikhail Gorbachev, and 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.
