I find that the best place to find favorites is to go back to basics – back to the images that you have loved, it seems like forever. So today’s favorite is one of my all time favorite portraits, Yousef Karsh’s, “Winston Churchill, 1941.” This image was produced for Life Magazine and is truly iconic. It was an image taken during a time of war and deep national threat. It was an image taken in a world that needed heroes. We always need heroes. And it was an image for the ages. And that raises a significant question. Is the taking of such an image an act solely immediate or is there always a sense of history and timelessness even at the moment of conception.

The story of how Karsh created his Churchill portrait has been repeated so many times, that it itself has become iconic, and certainly bears retelling one more time. Chiurchill had just addressed the Canadian Parliament and Karsh was there to record the moment. “He was in no mood for portraiture and two minutes were all that he would allow me as he passed from the House of Commons chamber to an anteroom …Two niggardly minutes in which I must try to put on film a man who had already written or inspired a library of books, baffled all his biographers, filled the world with his fame, and me, on this occasion, with dread.” Churchill stalked into the room where Karsh’s camera was set up.  He was scowling, “regarding my camera as he might regard the German enemy.” His expression suited Karsh perfectly but the cigar? “Instinctively, I removed the cigar. At this the Churchillian scowl deepened, the head was thrust forward belligerently, and the hand placed on the hip in an attitude of anger.” This was the defiant and unconquerable Prime Minister. This was the epitome of the defiant and unconquerable British people. Churchill later said to him, “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed,” and Karsh entitled it, The Roaring Lion. The Roaring Lion is one of the masterpieces of photographic portraiture.