Yousef Krash once said “within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can” which is evident from his up close, intrusive and memorable portrait photography. he is undoubtably one of the most well known portrait photographers, along side that of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, having photographed many hugely influential and famous people such as Grace Kelly and Winston Churchill.
Krash has a particular house style of photography usually photographing his subjects on dark backgrounds and making fill the entire frame. He lights his images with one main light source which is always focused on the face allowing other elements of the image, such as the hands and body, to fall into darkness which in turn highlights the face, as shown below.
Usually he places the light directly in front of the subject in order to highlight the face of the subject and enhance their expression as well as the lines and wrinkles on their face. This helps the audience to read the image and tell us a bit about who is photographing. The face and the eyes are the most important part of his images and the most important thing we look at in order to read a person, by allowing everything else to fall away from the image, Krash highlights this idea and encourages his audience to get to know the person that he is photographing. This is something which is consistent in his photography as he saw it as a way to uncover a persons secrets and discover their passions.
occasionally, Krash used props and arrangement in order to help his audiences read his images. While still subtle, they prove to be every effective, for example the portrait he took of Andy Warhol shown him painting his face with a brush, if you didn’t know who Warhol was you could make the educated guess that he was an artists and was so incredibly passionate about his work. Krash moves the light for this portraits to the left hand side of Warhol which means that the paint brush is completely illuminated and as we move across the image his face begins to develop a slight shadow, this supports the idea of him being a passionate artist.
Krash often moves his main light source to compliment an image, he does this in order to find a way to photograph the subject as close to their personality as he can. For example, in this photo of Martin Luther King, Krash moves the light to the right of him and has him looking up at is. This produces a nice even light across his face which lifts his face from the rest of the photo. He positions King looking into the light and away from the camera which suggests that he is looking into the future, which again gives the audience an insight into who he is. Krash also separates King from the background by using a slight back light, something which he seems to have used more than once to produce the same effect of importance all with the aim of allowing the audience to gather an insight into his subjects lives and who they are behind the camera.
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