Yousuf Karsh was born on December 23, 1908 in Madin, Turkey. Due to an Armenian genocide campaign, Karsh immigrated to Canada in 1924 to live with his uncle, George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec. He assisted his uncle in his studio before being apprenticed to John Garo, a portrait photographer in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1928. In 1931, Karsh started working with John Powls in Ottawa, Ontario. Karsh took over Powls’s studio when Powls retired in 1933. Karsh's first solo exhibition took place in 1936 in the Chateau Laurier Hotel. Karsh moved his studio to this same hotel in 1973 and remained there until he retired in 1992. Karsh gained prominence with his 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill and was known throughout his career for his portraits of other prominent and powerful individuals, including Queen Elizabeth II, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Audrey Hepburn, and Grace Kelly. He married Estrellita Nachbar, a medical writer and historian in 1962. He moved to Boston, Massachusetts in the 1990s and died there on July 13, 2002.