Albert Schweitzer

Karsh, Yousuf, 1908-2002 · 1954

It had taken me a long time to catch up with “Le Grand Docteur.” For several years I had wondered how I should ever reach his home and hospital in Lambaréné, French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon); but, by good luck, I found myself in France in 1954 when he was visiting his home town, Gunsbach, in Alsace. ~ When one has read all Schweitzer’s works and long admired him from the distance, one fears that the actual man will fall below the imagined image. But he was all one imagined he would be. I felt at once, as everyone who meets him does, the presence of a conscious and immense wisdom, the stronger for its utter simplicity... What struck me from the beginning was this man’s power to concentrate totally on the business at hand. When the equipment was being prepared he went back to his writing as if he were alone in the room, and then, when I was ready, he gave me his full attention. ~ Of course, a thousand questions were on my tongue and it was tantalizing to realize that I would not have time to ask a fraction of him. While we talked I watched Dr. Schweitzer closely, especially his hands. These were the fine hands of a musician and a healer. I wished to photograph him holding some books, preferably an album of Bach, but he protested that to use Bach’s music for this purpose would be like “choucroute garni.” Accordingly, with a shy smile, he brought out some of his own books. And then he revealed a very human side, a little confession of vanity, by refusing to be photographed while wearing his spectacles. “They make me look too old,” he said. ~ It was, of course, my hope not so much to make the portrait that Schweitzer might desire but to catch him, if possible, at an unconscious moment when, perhaps, my camera might seize something of those qualities which have made him great as a doctor, musician, philosopher, humanitarian, theologian, and writer. The picture printed here was taken in a moment of meditation (Karsh, 1976).