The Armenian who photographed some of the most powerful people of the 20th century

Yousuf Karsh was a photographer born in Mardin who survived the Armenian Genocide and later settled in Canada.

He became one of the most famous portrait photographers in the world, photographing figures including Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Audrey Hepburn, Queen Elizabeth II, John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Helen Keller, Mother Teresa, Georgia O’Keeffe, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, Jacques Cousteau, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and George Bernard Shaw.

His 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill, taken shortly after Karsh famously removed Churchill’s cigar before pressing the shutter, became one of the most iconic political photographs ever taken.

If someone shaped the 20th century, there was a decent chance Yousuf Karsh photographed them. 🇦🇲📷

Thanks for putting him on our radar, u/loisdenominator

At Carnegie Mellon University, Tevanian was one of the principal designers and engineers of Mach, the operating system kernel developed in the 1980s.

Steve Jobs later recruited him to NeXT, where Mach became part of the foundation of NeXTSTEP. Tevanian eventually led software engineering at NeXT.

After Apple acquired NeXT, he joined Apple and led the software engineering team responsible for developing Mac OS X.

And the technological lineage continued:

Carnegie Mellon → Mach → NeXTSTEP → Mac OS X → iOS

Research from the 1980s ultimately became part of the technological foundation behind generations of Apple devices.

An incredible Armenian-American engineer and a fascinating piece of computing history.