YOUSSEF NABIL

As close as I can get
by Jerome Sans

Jerome Sans: When did you decide to go from cinema into photography, and why?

Youssef Nabil: About 15 years ago I started taking black and white pictures of my friends in Egypt, asking them to play specific scenes from movies. Cinema is central in Egypt and I've been inspired specially by woman actresses with strong characters. I was excited about photographing them in a different way. Then I decided to colour photographs with the same method Technicolor movies were done in the past.

J.S: Why did you chose to use this traditional egyptian photographic technic?

Y.N: I grew up with it and it was all around me, between hand painted family portraits, hand painted movie posters in Cairo's streets… It was so much that I decided to keep it in my work. It's an old technique that was still practiced in Egypt in the 1970s and in the 1980s. So I went to one of the last portrait studio to learn this old technique and be able to add a contemporary edge to it in my work.

J.S: How do you choose the characters you photograph?

Y.N: Well, it depends. I either have to like them, their work or their face character. Something has to move me.

J.S: You have started a portrait serie of artists with Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Marina Abramovic, Tracey Emin, Julian Schnabel, David Lynch…, what is the genesis of this project?

Y.N: I first portrayed the writer Naguib Mahfouz. My idea was to photograph them as close as one can get to someone, to feel the skin, reach out to any face expressions and avoid being distracted by how they are dressed. The proximity with their face makes you feel like if you were seeing them naked. You're straight into their soul, out of time.

J.S: In many of your portraits the subject is asleep with a stardust, why?

Y.N: Sleeping takes a big part of my thinking, and mostly because its relation to death… which is a subject I always talk about in my work… but it is also sexual… and I like that about it… there are many meanings for it… people also look so peaceful, natural and honest when they close their eyes… you almost want to hold them in your arms… have you seen anyone looking unnatural or superficial while sleeping?

J.S: You have done many naked portraits, how would you define your position within the art of the naked body?

Y.N: Although I'm a voyeur… when I photograph someone naked, it's neither about sex nor about seeing that person naked. It's about love. It's about getting to know someone through the most intimate door. My approach stresses more on the emotions, the tenderness naturally expressed by the body, then the body itself. It is the same process as the close-up portraits I was describing earlier, in the opposite way.

J.S: You have moved in Paris in 2003 for a long stay, did it had an impact on your work?

Y.N: When I moved to Paris, I had a different life from the one I had in Egypt… I was in a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, at that period I had a lot of time for myself and I started asking myself questions about life, my relationship to my country, etc… So I decided to talk about it in my self portrait serie, where I am a witness of this reflexion and the stories it has generated from places to places as each portrait is done in a different city, I felt in all of them that I was a visitor and I had to leave… the same feeling I had when I was living in Egypt… the same feeling always had about my whole existence… for me it is about coming to a place that is not yours, then having to go…

J.S: The way you compose pictures is very close to painting, could we say that you handle photography like a painter?

Y.N: You can say that, I never felt like I'm a photographer really, my approach to my work is not photography in the first place… my work for me is like a painted diary.

J.S: Are you building a diary of your own life with your photographs?

Y.N: Yes I am. I'm very preoccupied by death and each of my photograph immortalizes my meeting with someone, engrave a moment that will not happen anymore. Already when I was a child watching movies, I was asking where are all those actors and why people dissappear. I was developing my own relationship with each actor to the point that their death even in the film was affecting me. That's the reason why my work deals with this dialogue between love and death. Photographying is a way to say I'm still alive and that I also keep other people alive and remembered through my work.

J.S: Did you ever think of making a film in slow motion with your pictures?

Y.N: Actually I was approached by a production company in Los Angeles last year and I wrote a short movie. Now we're in the process of looking for funding. The story is half autobiographical, about a boy and his relation to his mother and religion. I'm stage the two attitudes towards Islam that we have right now. I grew up as a Muslim and in Egypt it has never been a problem to be rather Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Wearing the veil or not has always been a personal choice, and it was never an issue. But today it is a matter to separate and point out people upon their beliefs, who wears what and who covers more, and if you're not covering enough then you're a bad person… So the aim of my film is to ask the right questions and reverse the wrong clichés about Islam, for me religion must gather people and not separate them… and it is one of Islam's messages…

J.S: How do you see the situation for contemporary art today in the Arab countries?

Y.N: I think contemporary art can really help showing another side of the arab world, a side that nobody knows today. It's high time to focus on the creative and positive movements underway here.

Jerome Sans
Venice, June 2007

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