Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh's dramatic glimpses of public figures like Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway made him one of the most famous portrait photographers of the 20th century. Karsh and his family fled Armenia when he was 15 years old. He ended up in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, where he learned photography and gained access to prominent national and international figures just as World War II was beginning. He worked mostly in black and white, with a large 8x10 view camera, often catching his subjects in surprisingly intimate or pensive moments. (His famous 1941 portrait of a glowering Churchill was snapped after Karsh snatched a cigar from between the prime minister's lips.) Many of his portraits were printed inLife magazine, giving Karsh even wider exposure. Among his subjects were Albert Einstein,Andy Warhol, John F. Kennedy, Pablo Picasso and George Bernard Shaw.
Karsh's younger brother Malak was a well-known photographer of Canadian landscapes... Karsh's portrait of Helen Keller was unusual: a close-up of her hands, pressed together as if in prayer

also Yousuf is one of the most renown portrait photographers from the 20th Century.Karsh was a master in the use of studio lights. One aspect of Karsh's portrait is the emphasis on the lighting the subject's hands separately. He photographed many of the great and celebrated personalities of his generationKarsh had a gift for capturing the essence of his subject in the instant of his portrait. As Karsh wrote of his own work in Karsh Portfolio in 1967, "Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize."

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was born, to a wealthy Jewish family, in 1923. At the age of 13, she met Allan Arbus, an employee in the advertising department of her parents' store, and they married, with her parents' grudging assent, after she turned 18. After the war, during which Allan studied photography in the New Jersey Signal Corps, the couple supported themselves, and daughters Doon and Yolanda, as fashion photographers (the family money, somehow, never materialized for Arbus as an adult).  Allan gave Diane her first camera, and they took equal credit on their published photos.