Karim Shamsi-Basha

Karim Shamsi-Basha is an award-winning Birmingham photographer and co-founder of Portico magazine.

Born in 1965 in Damascus, Syria, Shamsi-Basha calls himself a self-taught photographer. He came to the United States in 1984 to study mechanical engineering at the University of Tennessee. He was a news photographer in Knoxville, Tennessee, before joining the Birmingham Post-Herald. Since turning to free-lance work, his pictures have appeared in Life, Time, Newsweek, People, Southern Accents, and many other major publications. As of 2006 he is a contract photographer for Southern Living and often shoots for Sports Illustrated.

In 1997 he collaborated with writer Kathy Kemp on The Beauty Box, a picture book about southern beauty parlors. The book took its title from a long-standing beauty parlor on Third Avenue South in Birmingham.

In 2001 Shamsi-Basha founded Portico with three partners.

In 2006 Karim's gallery of portraits of Birmingham Muslims appeared in Saudi Aramco World magazine under the title "Birmingham 9 to 5."[1]

References

• karimisms.com
• Kathy Kemp and Karim Shamsi-Basha. The Beauty Box: A Tribute to the Legendary Beauty Parlors of the South. Birmingham: Crane Hill Publishers, 1997. ISBN 1881548880
• Karim Shamsi-Basha. "Ten Days in Damascus." Saudi Aramco World 56 (3) (May/June 2005): 2-9.
• Karim Shamsi-Basha and Ann Walton Sieber. "Birmingham 9 to 5." Saudi Aramco World 57 (6) (November/December 2006): 33-43.