YOUNG EGYPTIAN PHOTOGRAPHER YOUSSEF NABIL TURNS HIS LENS ON HIMSELF
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie Daily Star staff Friday

The Daily Star, Lebanon
October 7 2005

Self-portrait exhibition at Cairo gallery one of artist’s four
high-profile shows this year

BEIRUT: Renowned novelist Naguib Mahfouz: all glasses and graying
goatee with a smile pronouncing itself in the curve of his cheeks.

Legendary bellydancer Fifi Abdou: her famous waist cinched in a black
evening gown, standing on what look to be a powerful pair of shins,
her body cropped at her sternum. The movie star Suhair Nassim, aka
Youssra: eyes closed to convey lust and longing, planting a sumptuous
kiss on the lips of her own reflection. The crude yet immensely popular
singer Shaaban Abdel Rehim (of “I Hate Israel” fame): a close-up of
his hands, weighed down with heavy gold rings and bracelets, gently
folded over his soft and protruding gut.

Young Egyptian photographer Youssef Nabil may be best known for his
celebrity portraiture (all of the above plus Paulo Coelho, Julian
Schnabel and John Waters, to name a few) and his quirky images of
colleagues and friends, such as singer Natacha Atlas (a close-up of her
cleavage), actress Rosy De Palma (sticking her tongue out the corner
of her mouth) and artists Shirin Neshat (in severe black eyeliner),
Tracey Emin (in cowboy boots over argyle socks) and Ghada Amer (face
down on her drafting board with a thimble on her middle finger). But
from now through October 12, Nabil is showing a much different face
at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art – his own.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with myself since I moved to Paris three
years ago,” says Nabil, in an interview conducted between Paris and
Beirut. “It reminded me of my childhood. I was a very introverted
child, always by myself in my room. That made me ask myself many
questions about my life and existence. I decided to talk about it in
my work.”

The Townhouse show, titled “Realities to Dreams,” features 11
self-portraits, all done in Nabil’s signature style. He takes
evocative, high-contrast black-and-white photographs with a
35-millimeter camera. Then he applies the antiquated technique of
hand-painting them all, meticulously, painstakingly, one at a time
(he prints his photographs in editions of 10, but the hand-coloring
essentially renders each picture unique).

Whether he’s shooting himself or a subject, Nabil works on location,
not inside a studio. The set-up doesn’t take much time, he says. “I
ask people to look the way they usually are … No makeup as I do it
myself when coloring the photo. I like to meet people at least one time
before the shoot. We feel things [out] and talk about everything. Then
the day of the shoot is really fast, sometimes it’s only for 10 or
15 minutes … Most of the time I spend is when I color. It takes me
three days to do one photo. I also could photograph any time of the
day, but to start coloring I need to be in a certain mental flow and
free from all other thoughts.”

Nabil, who turns 33 next month, originally wanted to be a filmmaker.

As a kid he was inspired by the retro glamor of Egyptian cinema’s
golden age, and particularly by the photo-novels used to accompany
those old films. He studied literature at Cairo University and
began taking pictures at 19. Then he got two opportunities he’d be
crazy to refuse – the first as an assistant to New York-based fashion
photographer David Lachapelle (who, interestingly enough, just released
his own first film, the critically acclaimed documentary “Rize”
about hip-hop dance styles krumping and clowning in Los Angeles),
the second as an assistant to Paris-based fashion photographer and
celebrity portraitist Mario Testino.

In addition to learning from the expertise of Lachapelle and
Testino, both giants in terms of fashion photography and skilled at
crossing over into contemporary art, Nabil benefited immensely from
a long friendship with legendary Egyptian-Armenian photographer Leon
Boyadjian, better known as Van Leo. With Van Leo’s work, Nabil shares
a sense of faded beauty, crumbling elegance, and rootless nostalgia.

While it is tempting to read Nabil’s self-portraits as an homage
to Van Leo, who once rather famously shot 400 pictures of himself
donning 400 different identities in a single year, Nabil insists his
intentions are personal, interior and reflective.

“I started doing them in 1992 in my room,” he explains. Of the images
on view at Townhouse, he adds: “I did all of them during the past three
years, in my travels. Some I had the idea [for] before and traveled
specially to do the portrait, and some were more spontaneous. I felt
in all of them that I was a visitor.”

The effect of Nabil’s current exhibition in Cairo, and of his
self-portraits on their own as a body of work, is subtle, like a
graceful accumulation of gestures. What becomes clear when looking
at them all at once is that Nabil never faces his own camera directly.

He looks above or to the side of the lens or he turns his head
completely. The viewer becomes Nabil’s accomplice, gazing out onto
the same scene and then, inevitably, searching for something. What
can be seen in this quaint lantern nestled into a pile of autumn
leaves? What can be found hidden among the delicate leaves and lily
pads of an English park east of Paris?

“There is always something that we look for, that we wish to have
or understand or achieve,” he says. But “nothing is complete, and
nothing will remain the same.”

As a title, “Realities to Dreams” is “a personal thing. Since I was
a kid I had a way of mixing my dreams with my realities and realities
with my dreams. It’s my way of seeing things, too … ”

The Townhouse show is one of four high-profile exhibitions Nabil
has lined up for the rest of this year. Through October 14, his more
glamorous imagery and celebrity portraiture is on view at the upstart
Dubai gallery Third Line.

In late November, Nabil is participating in the Institut du Monde
Arabe’s blockbuster show on contemporary Arab photography, featuring
nearly 25 artists from Jananne al-Ani, Nadim Asfar and Lara Baladi
to Susan Hefuna, Randa Shaath, Ahlam Shibli and the team of Paola
Yacoub and Michel Lasserre. Nabil will show self-portraits and nudes.

Before the year is out, he has another solo exhibition at Patricia
Liligant in New York, a 57th Street gallery that specializes in vintage
and contemporary photography and houses an archive of work by the likes
of Hans Bellmer, Brassai and Man Ray (not bad company to be in). There,
Nabil will show “Not Afraid to Love,” a collection of work done on
more sexual themes (photographs like the one titled “Tamer,” framing
a young man with an issue of Playboy draped lazily across his chest,
an arm reaching down, out of the composition, into the imagination).

Nabil doesn’t imagine he’ll ever give up black-and-white film,
hand-tinting or the idea of portraiture. “I like people and like
watching them,” he jokes. “I guess I’m a voyeur by nature.” He hasn’t
given up on film and is writing his first movie now. He hopes to take
Elizabeth Taylor’s portrait one day. And he still pines for never
having the chance to shoot Frida Kahlo or Umm Kalthoum. Impossible
in reality, perhaps. But highly plausible in Nabil’s dreams.

Youssef Nabil’s “Realities to Dreams” is on view at Cairo’s Townhouse
Gallery of Contemporary Art through October 12. For more information,
call +20 2 576 8086 or check out

“Youssef Nabil: Portraits” is on view at Dubai’s Third Line through
October 14. For more information, call +971 4 394 3194 or check out