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 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. 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.

Shamsi-Basha has a studio at Pepper Place, where he is planning to open a gallery of Arabian art. He and his three children, Zade, Dury and Demi, reside in Edgewood.

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