Karim Shamsi-Basha
Karim Shamsi-Basha (born 1965 in Damascus, Syria) is an award-winning Birmingham photographer and co-founder of Portico magazine.
Shamsi-Basha grew up in Damascus and was raised as Muslim, but was also encouraged by his father, a poet and writer, to explore his own spirituality.
Shamsi-Basha came to the United States in 1984 to study mechanical engineering at the University of Tennessee. He taught himself to shoot photographs and worked as a news photographer in Knoxville before joining the Birmingham Post-Herald. In 1992 Shamsi-Basha suffered an aneurysm while photographing the fire at Independent Presbyterian Church
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 3rd Avenue South in Birmingham.
In 2001 Shamsi-Basha founded the lifestyle magazine Portico with three partners.
In 2006 he published a coffee table book of his photographs, Home Sweet Home Alabama, with a foreword by Steve Chiotakis.
Through his connection to Damascus, Shamsi-Basha became interested in the writing of the Christian apostle Paul. Through his study, he converted to Christianity. He related his long spiritual path in a 2013 memoir, Paul and Me. Illustrator Yuko Shimizu was awarded a 2021 Caldecott medal for the children's book The Cat Man of Aleppo, which Shamsi-Basha co-wrote with Irene Latham.
Publications
- Kemp, Kathy and Karim Shamsi-Basha. (1997) The Beauty Box: A Tribute to the Legendary Beauty Parlors of the South. Birmingham: Crane Hill Publishers. ISBN 1881548880
- Shamsi-Basha, Karim (May/June 2005) "Ten Days in Damascus." Saudi Aramco World Vol. 56, No. 3 pp. 2-9.
- Shamsi-Basha, Karim and Ann Walton Sieber. (November/December 2006) "Birmingham 9 to 5." Saudi Aramco World Vol. 57, No 6., pp. 33-43.
- Shamsi-Basha, Karim (November 2006) Home Sweet Home Alabama. Birmingham: Sweetwater Press. ISBN 158173493X
- Latham, Irene & Karim Shamsi-Basha (2020) The Cat Man of Aleppo. G. B. Putnam's Sons ISBN 9781984813787
References
- Garrison, Greg (September 24, 2013) "Christian photographer left Syria and Islam, writes book about his road from Damascus." The Birmingham News