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A fragment of eternity
by Michket Krifa Born in Egypt in 1972, Youssef Nabil grew up in a Cairo drenched in the cinema of the golden age of Hollywood on the Nile: a black and white film world of which he nostalgically recalls the glamour, the ease, the elegance and the melodrama. He began to take photos very young, when he was only nineteen and studying literature at the University of Cairo. Two meetings with artists were to prove turning points in career terms: the first with David Lachapelle, whose assistant he became in New York, and the second with Mario Testino, whom he followed to Paris. The ensuing experiences with two of fashion photography's most talented exponents not only taught him the sophistication the genre demands, but also, paradoxically, helped him to develop his eye and personal style. That early attachment to the cinema lives on in his photos in a special fondness for mise en scène and choice of settings. Youssef Nabil goes to enormous lengths to evoke the deliciously outmoded feel of the photo-novels that accompanied the cinema at the time; creating his images in the spirit of the top studios of the period, he seeks to highlight in each portrait the extraordinary character of his models. Taken in black and white, the developed photos are then scrupulously hand-coloured. His models are Egyptian or international artists: actors, singers, musicians and practitioners of the visual arts. For him, taking someone's photograph requires feeling affection for the person concerned: his work is a way of approaching people who attract or fascinate him, or whom he would like to get to know. There are also his personal icons, figures who are no longer with us but whom he succeeds in reincarnating via his friends or models. He sees celebrity as conferring a kind of immortality, something that enables those touched by it to conquer death via an existing or re-created image. Despite this touch of eternity, these figures basking in admiration remain trapped by a loneliness that fossilises them in their role as stars: living out fame cuts the individual off from others and isolates him or her in a solitude not far removed from death. Such is the despair of the human being faced with the emptiness of a life ultimately reduced to a mere coloured image. More recently Youssef Nabil has gone even deeper into the connections between love and death. More metaphysical in character, his latest photos mix menacing, sexually charged objects with people seeing the sense and the essence of their lives eluding them – a long way from the frivolousness of the Glamour years.
Michket Krifa, curator of the "Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie"
Arles, 2003 |