How Ottawa’s Tulip Festival was born
To mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation, we’d like to introduce you to some of the people who have shaped and built the National Capital. Today: Malak Karsh. Photographer Malak Karsh shone light on city’s tulips
It was through the camera lens of a dapper, Armenian immigrant that the full glory of Ottawa and its spring tulips were revealed to the wider world.
The scenes captured by Malak Karsh would help transform the city’s image from a baseborn lumber town to a flowering capital, and establish Ottawa as a premier Canadian tourist destination. His images would appear on stamps, calendars, magazine covers and the back of the dollar bill.
“Malak of Ottawa,” as he styled himself, also left the city other lasting gifts, most notably a landmark festival. The annual tulip festival would become a much-loved institution and propagate a teeming garden of festivals: Canada Day, Winterlude, Bluesfest, CityFolk and Ribfest, among many more.
The tulip festival was born when Malak approached the Ottawa Board of Trade with the idea in 1952. It was launched the following spring.
“We had all these tulips and I thought they belonged to all Canadians, so I thought we should create a tulip festival,” Malak once explained. “It became a phenomenon that shows in one way the pride of Canadians in their gardens and it points to the power of photography, of the image.”
Malak — he used only his first name to distinguish himself from his famous older brother, portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh — loved his adopted country. His unbridled affection for the National Capital Region poured from his photographs.
“This is the only landscape that lets me take crocuses through the snow,” he once told an interviewer. “And in winter, the hoarfrost and trees here transform our landscape into a fairyland.”
Malak captured log drives on the Ottawa River; the Parliament buildings draped in snow and shadow; a tour boat emerging from the mist of Rideau Falls; and the ByWard Market brimming with produce.
Then, of course, there were the tulips. Malak once said he had no favourite among the nearly one million images he shot over his career. But there could never be any doubt about his favourite subject matter.
“I have unlimited love for tulips,” he said. “Every year, I say I have enough tulip pictures, I won’t take any more. But each year, it doesn’t work.”
Malak photographed Ottawa’s tulips as they bloomed for the first time on Parliament Hill one year after the end of the Second World War. Canada had received the bulbs the year before from the Dutch Royal Family as a gift for liberating The Netherlands from German occupation and for providing sanctuary to Princess Juliana.
Malak’s 1946 photograph of red tulips framing the Peace Tower became an instant Canadian classic. He would photograph Ottawa’s essential rite of spring every year for more than half a century.
“Those images are part of our identity now and he helped create that,” said the Ottawa Art Gallery’s Stephanie Germano, who curated an exhibit of Malak’s photos in 2015.
Michel Gauthier, the longtime manager of the Canadian Tulip Festival, said Malak captured the beauty of the city — the Parliament Buildings, the Rideau Canal, the Ottawa River — with the passion of a man fully committed to his art and to his subject matter. “He was full of energy: He was full of pride for Ottawa and full of pride for Canada.”
Ottawa’s greatest brand ambassador was born in what is now Mardin, Turkey, only weeks before the Ottoman Empire began the forced deportation of its Armenian Christian population in April 1915. The massive deportation and accompanying massacres killed more than one million Armenians.
But Malak survived the slaughter and, in 1937, he joined his older brother, Yousuf, in Canada.
Malak learned the art of photography from his sibling, but unlike Yousuf, Malak decided to concentrate on nature. It was a decision prompted by his first visit to the Gatineau Hills.
“When I saw the beautiful autumn colours, I said, ‘That is what I am going to be: I am going to be a photographer,’ ” Malak told an interviewer in 1997. “If Canada is all as beautiful as the Gatineaus, I am going to travel all over Canada.”
He established his own photographic studio on Sparks Street in April 1941 and hired a young assistant, Barbara Fraser. They were married the following year.
At first, he struggled to establish himself and was all but broke after being forced into a nursing home for three years in the mid-1940s with tuberculosis. When he regained his strength, however, he travelled the country and built a career based on hard work, a keen eye and salesmanship.
Stories about Malak’s singleminded determination to capture the right light, the perfect shadow, are the stuff of legend. He would balance on floating logs to capture a river scene, and would crouch tirelessly on the frozen Ottawa River to wait for sunshine.
Even his brother, Yousuf, marvelled at Malak’s “patient endurance.” Malak’s wife, Barbara, who still lives in the Glebe home she shared with her husband, said he loved everything about photography: “He’d just see the pictures and forget about everything else, his own comfort, whatever. He was always trying to capture moments with his camera before they were gone.” He always wore a suit and tie, and didn’t like to be seen in shirt sleeves, even on the hottest of summer days.
Malak earned the Order of Canada for his work, which has been displayed at the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Ottawa Art Gallery. More than 200,000 of his photos are preserved by Library and Archives Canada.
Malak Karsh died from complications of leukemia in November 2001, only two days after making his final photographic pilgrimage to Parliament Hill to capture the last of the autumn leaves.