Karsh: American Legends

With a memorable portrait style perhaps best exemplified by his photo of a doggedly defiant Winston Churchill during WW II, and the equally distinctive professional title Karsh of Ottawa, Armenian-Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh has dominated the conventional personal-portrait field in North America for half a century. He long combined strong, balanced frontal lighting with limited backlight that outlined his subject, creating an effect so readily identifiable that few imitated it. More recently, as in his celebrity portraits collected here, he uses lighting as a dramatic variable, along with limited props, background and educed facial expression, to interpret character. As ``legends,'' the personages seen here transcend in reknown their specialties--playwright Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Miller, activists Cesar Chavez and Mother Hale, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and entertainer-philosophers Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog, to name a few. (Oct.)