YOUSSEF NABIL

I Live Within You: portraits of Youssef Nabil
by Melissa Messina

…every portrait of another person is a “self-portrait” of the photographer…
Susan Sontag¹

Ultimately, of course, every self-portrait is a fiction, a portrait of someone else...
Robert A. Sobieszek²

In three unique yet interconnected series of hand colored photographs—staged cinematic stills; portraits of artists, writers, actors and filmmakers; and haunting self-portraits—Cairo-born artist Youssef Nabil offers us his life as cinema. Paying homage to the glamour of classical Egyptian films that mesmerized him as a child, his earliest artistic expression was manifested in the cinema series. Nabil’s “never-ending fascination with cinema—its time, its glamour and stardom” translated into a style that honors this rich cultural tradition.³ His oeuvre developed to include a portrait series of famed notables who inspired him and whose achievements mirrored his own ambitions. More recently, he turned the camera inward to capture his physical self in dreamlike landscapes, the artist as impermanent traveler. The collective imagery reflects Nabil’s longing to displace time and immortalize his encounters. They portray his need to be connected to others in this brief life. “I want to photograph everyone I love, I want to keep part of them with me, I want them to live forever through my work,” wrote Nabil.⁴

This desire for permanence is a crucial aspect of each series and is undeniably felt in each image. The cinematic stills and portraits are Nabil’s way of holding a mirror to his life, his self-portraits a reflection of his physical existence and, as such, his compelling acceptance of death. As Robert Sobieszek wrote in the exhibition catalog The Camera I, “The self that stares back at the artist was once, when the photograph was made, and is no longer; marking a time immediately removed in time, it portends the immanency of death."⁵ Thus it is through photography, what Susan Sontag described as “the image world that bids to outlast us all,” that Nabil has chosen to preserve his transitory experiences.⁶ The camera is the mechanism through which he presents his nostalgic scenes; the signature hand coloring of each silver gelatin print is the technique that draws the viewer to their seductive allure. In combination, we are meant to see the self-portrait in every image. “I think mostly they are about myself… Everything that I pass through—Egypt, East, West—they are all me. I basically fit them all.”⁷

Nabil first saw himself in the Egyptian films of the 1950s, 60s and 70s he watched as a child. Serving as the inspiration for his cinema series, Nabil was drawn to “the deathly quality of faded beauty, the decadent elegance of old times,” more so than the content of these popular films.⁸ Egypt, once dubbed the “Hollywood of the Nile,” was by the 1950s “the vital counterpoint to Hollywood, ranking second in size to commercial Indian cinema.”⁹ Nabil does not attempt to recreate the narratives of melodramatic “New Realism,” a film style of this era that attempted to expose social ills in commercial filmmaking.¹⁰ Rather, he interprets what Viola Shafik, historian of Middle Eastern film, describes as Egyptian popular film’s “oscillat[ion] between realist referentiality and symbolic, metaphorical and allegorical codings.”¹¹ Furthermore, the cinema series photographs call forth the theatrical roots of late 19th-century Egypt out of which the region’s film industry grew.¹² His images are focused on an idealized glamour, an aura that references the “dream factory” that after World War II “lure[d] viewers from the mundanerealities of everyday life.” ¹³

Ever the meticulous director, Nabil is a “master of staged photography,” and no detail is left unconsidered.¹⁴ He has said the cinema series conveys his “idea of how I like women to look, how I like men to look, how I see these people in relation to old movies. Everything you see was actually planned before.”¹⁵ His crafted scenes are first developed as black and white prints and then, quite literally, colored with his romantic sensibility. This hand coloring in watercolor, gouache and pencil reanimates the scene, rendering each print unique. It is a time-consuming process that speaks to Nabil’s clear and precise artistic vision. His revival of this process, the lost art of hand painting movie house posters, which he apprenticed to learn, conveys his love of the bygone era of cinema. The refined act of this paintedhand work is a memorializing, an idealizing of the past. Nabil says of his subjects, “I want them to look like my thinking.” ¹⁶

The cinema series narratives are not driven by a specific story line, but rather offer beautiful, anonymous starlets in settings that require our interpretation. For instance, Ehsan and Light, Cairo, 1993, portrays a beautiful and bejeweled actress who stares seductively with pouted wine-stained lips, her arms wrapped languidly around an industrial movie light. Ehsan is a symbol of Egypt presented as a fecund young woman whose light will shine in perpetuity. Nabil has described Egypt as a mother who has given birth to him.¹⁷ Having left Egypt in his early career, this bittersweet departure is conveyed through Ehsan’s distant stare and vulnerable expression.

Other images such as Simone in Downtown Bar, Cairo, 1997 and Ehsan Crying, Cairo, 1997, also present Egypt as the abandoned heroine. Each woman is alone in a melancholic glamour, her troubled aura transcending her beauty. In a 2008 interview with Egyptian film icon, Faten Hamama, whom Nabil photographed in the portrait Faten Hamama, Cairo, 2008, the actress spoke of Egypt’s past: “It was calmer, and definitely people were better than today. I find that people are more inclined to hate each other now.”¹⁸ Nabil himself describes Egypt today as being in “a very desperate time religiously, politically, economically and with human rights.”¹⁹ The cinema series can thus be interpreted as an allegory for Nabil’s life, a symbolic narrative of the self. In these works, Nabil identifies himself with Egypt,
with its cinematic history, and honors the cultural legacy of his birthplace. He is at once, Ehsan, Simone, even Pasha (Lonely Pasha, Cairo, 2002), heavy-lidded and lovelorn.

No works highlight what Liliane Karnouk describes in Modern Egyptian Art 1910-2003 as Nabil’s ability to reveal “a certain Egyptian sense of loss” more than in his self-portraits taken before vintage theater marquees.²⁰ Specifically part of the cinema series and an early departure into his self-portrait series, photographs such as CINEMA—Self Portrait, Florence, 2006 convey Nabil’s point of view both in front of and behind the camera—simultaneously the director, the star and Egyptian cinema personified. He positions the shot angled upward focusing on his face; a mysterious dark corridor behind frames his profile. A single light fixture in the distance balances the only other source of light, the letters “CINEMA” spelled out in a golden glow above his head. In these various works (others shot in New York, Paris and Madrid), Nabil consciously directed his lens at these near obsolete signs that were once beacons of the movies—not of specific films or the name of the theater’s owner as is more recently common, but a summons to themagic of the genre itself.

Interestingly, scholar Philip Kuberski wrote about cinema in relation to the West’s obsession with ancient Egypt: “The movie screen, like the pyramid walls on an Egyptian tomb, like the dreams inside our brains, presents a metaphysical space where time no longer operates according to its ordinary, relentless logic. All of these forms of expression actually ‘projected’ the soul, the desires and the shadows of life into a beyond. It was universally and unaccountably intoxicating.”²¹ Likewise, Nabil makes connections to the relationship between ancient Egypt and cinema, saying each “have to do with internalizing someone, living forever. Egyptians are very connected, related to, inspired by the idea of death and the afterlife.”²² Other representations of this connection have come in the form of photographed ancient relics such as the bust of Nefertiti in Nefertiti, Berlin, 2003 and Fragment of the Face of a Queen, New York, 2004. In these works, Nabil likewise connects these two mystical places, ancient Egypt and the cinema, offering the early queen’s portrait in the same enchanting style of richly colored textures andisolated focus as he applies to cinematic eminence such as Faten Hamama.

Threaded through Nabil’s work is a deliberate commentary on East and West. Like the artist, each series shares a combined state of these influences and sensibilities. The various series have been noted for their purposeful references to Orientalism and the exoticized ‘other.’ Critic and curator Octavio Zaya described the photographs as “vacillat[ing] between an unsatisfied search for an imaginary experience confronting those tired dichotomies of the Occident and the Orient—an experience which perhaps simultaneously affirms and exposes stereotypes and discrepancies of colonial desire—and the melancholic resignation of its impossibility in the age of general globalization and commodification.”²³ This interplay is most apparent in Nabil’s images of singer Natacha Atlas, whose pop music is a combination of North African and Arabic influences. Nabil depicts Atlas as the embodiment of strength and cosmopolitan glamour, with a certain unabashed confrontation in her poses. Whether she is unaware of our gaze as in Natacha with Eyes Closed, Cairo, 2000 in which she rests, lips parted, arms over head, amongst the blur of her spangled and jeweled costume, or confronting our stare as she kneels poised below a crown and cape ornament in Natacha with Crown, Cairo, 2000, she epitomizes the hybridity of contemporary culture and calls attention to the underpinnings of the Western gaze.“ She represented exactly what I wanted to say. She was the link between West and East in her music and in her self as a person, and I liked that. I felt somethingpersonal in her, and I related to it.” ²⁴

If the cinema series is intended to convey the glamour of classical film through richly staged mise-en-sc!ne, Nabil’s minimally staged portrait series are situated in stark contrast. Most of his portraits of famous figures are simple close-ups, like headshots, often with bare shoulders and almost always isolated in an austere turquoise background. Yet in the two distinct modes of representation, there exists a stylization that serves as a means of commemoration and idolization. The meticulously hand colored surface acts as a filter offering only what is beautiful. In this way Nabil venerates the subject, bringing forth that which he finds unique—the exaggerated eyes of artist Shirin Neshat (Shirin Neshat, Casablanca, 2007); the stubbled chin and silver pompadour of director David Lynch (David Lynch, Paris, 2007); and the ever-suited Gilbert and George (Gilbert & George, New York, 2007). One imagines the reverential relationship, the intimacy of each photo shoot. Natacha Atlas described her encounter: “While he is photographing you…you are his goddess, and there is nothing but you and him.”²⁵ Nabil’s alluring coloring encapsulates that unknown quality which makes each sitter a star, just out of our reach.

"The real problem, then, rests in how the artist radically alters the surface in order to get beyond it when there is only the surface with which to work,” wroteSobieszek of portrait photography. ²⁶ Nabil takes this challenge quite literally.

The colored surfaces do as much to conceal as reveal—that which animates also depersonalizes. In the image Tracey Sleeping, London, 2006, as with his portraits of Natacha Atlas, Nabil portrays his friend, the artist Tracey Emin, asleep. Emin, a controversial artist whose work is inspired by the personal details of her life, is presented in an exposed state. Shot from the shoulders up, we see she is nude except for two necklaces. Her hair is splayed around her as if she were floating. Like so many of Nabil’s portraits, the captivating, dreamlike warmth of the hand coloring draws us to her, yet we are kept at an intimate distance. Like Emin’s own art, we are left only with clues, never truly able to know her. Here again Nabil uses a seductive surface and enticing staging to perpetuate mythic stardom and, at the same time, thehuman desire for intimacy.

Sleep is a recurring state for Nabil’s subjects. For Nabil sleep is a “parallel world” to our waking existence, and one that is closest to death.²⁷ It is in this vulnerable mode of existence that Nabil captures his sitters, as well as himself, both in this world and another. In Julie Mehretu, New York, 2007, the artist rests on the floor with eyes closed, seemingly unaware of her large abstract painting, the vigorous lines and brushstrokes, hovering above. The background, Mehretu’s painting, is a literal representation of the mark she has left in the world. Here, Nabil is thus mirroring his own process—showing the creative act as one of negotiating impending death. Mehretus’s painting livesbeyond her time on earth just as Nabil’s photograph will likewise outlast him.

Historian Erika Billeter wrote that the self-portrait frequently functions as a kind of refuge, that “taking a picture is always preceded by the business of setting-the-stage to serve any number of purposes such as observation of oneself, self-analysis, a record of a mentally experienced state or the assumption of a role as a means of concealment or revelation.”²⁸ Nabil’s artistic practice encompasses all of these purposes. It is at once intensely personal, sharing with us a passion for immortalizing his mortal experience, and at the same time universal, as this wish lives within us all. “Cinema is life. And in my self-portrait series I think a lot about life and my relation to existence, and place, and to death, and to being here and going somewhere after. I think about the story I am trying to tell, which is actually cinema as well…You enter the movie to see the story and you know it will end, at one time, at one point,” said Nabil.²⁹ Though his photographs are no doubt alluring, melancholy and vulnerability pervade each image. The romantic imagery and dark beauty suggest Nabil’s embellished world will pale in comparison to the sublime of the next life.

As in the other series, Nabil’s self-portraits reference notions of death and the desire for connectivity in life. They are executed with a similar stylized cinematic sensibility and likewise utilize the isolated figure to uphold the thematic framework of permanence versus impermanence that connect the three bodies of work. For an artist strategically using the genre of self-portraiture, these images have less to do with Nabil personally than one might first assume. These works make deeper references to the fleeting nature of human existence in general than they do his personal longing. With figures kept remote, often in unspecific environments (sometimes we do not know the location but through the title), the self-portraits evoke the universal human desire for immortality. In Self Portrait at Night, Paris, 2005, for example, Nabil is turned from the camera—we see only his exposed back, as he looks afar to a colorful night skyline in the distance.

As Nabil’s self-portraits reference impermanence, or, more specifically, the attempt to preserve one’s experiences through the medium of photography, the hand coloring serves to poetically heighten the sense of the artist’s physical presence in the work. Furthermore, this literal surface effect symbolically references the body as the surface, or shell, for the soul. Several of the selfportraits allude more overtly to the corporality of death, with the artist’s body positioned at rest amongst the natural landscape; the selective coloring offers vivid contrast between the neutral skin tones and the vibrancy of the surroundings. In Self Portrait, Vincennes, 2003, for example, Nabil presents himself at edge of a pond, almost entirely hidden but for his bare arm, shoulders and back of his head. The bright azures of reflected light off the water and lime green leaves camouflage his physical form resting in the dark caverns of undergrowth. Similarly, Self Portrait with Roots, Los Angeles, 2008 shows Nabil asleep at the base of sinewy tree roots, head cradled among the curves. His expression is peaceful as he dreams among the surreal forms, the pale blue groundwork weaving through to the earth below. These images speak to the cycles of nature, particularly decomposition, and offeran alluring vision of death.

One of the more complex images making reference to the artist’s mortality is Feels Like Home—Self Portrait, Paris, 2004 in which Nabil stands at the base of a tree trunk with upright thicket tilting in around him. The branch structure, as well as the title of the work, refers to sanctuary—perhaps the sprigs are arranged as protection from the elements. On the other hand, the position of the artist, only his bare-skinned torso shown at the bottom with the vast looming copse above, can also be seen as threatening, the structure created as a funeral pyre. This work is among the few that overtly reveal a fear of isolation and, furthermore, a multifaceted response to mortality. Freud wrote that the “aim of all life is death,” but that does not preclude our deeper fear of it.³⁰ Feels Like Home, by its ominous tone and disquieting setting, offers the artist’s more primal emotions toward human existence.

If images such as Self Portrait with Roots, Los Angeles, 2008 portray Nabil in coalescence with nature and his surroundings, other self-portraits present a more alienated self. He appears as the voyeur, examining the peripheral landscape in discovery of his place within its extremes. In Funfair—Self Portrait, Paris, 2005, a hooded Nabil looks up with a tender expression to an unknown point beyond. Behind him towers a brightly lit Ferris wheel and the illuminations of the funfair, to which he seems completely detached. It is as if the world moves without him, he is fixed in a moment. Self Portrait, Hollywood, 2008 presents a similar narrative as the artist looks off into a richly colored dreamlike environment to the classic Hollywood sign in the far off hills. Nabil selects his surroundings via locations that move him, placeswhere he travels and feels a connection, where he might like to remain forever. ³¹

In addition to natural motifs and cultural references, religious and spiritual symbolism permeates Nabil’s self-portraits. Whether captured as stars in the sky reflecting tiny particles of sand in Self Portrait, Naples, 2003, or a radiant lantern held among dying leaves in Autumn Self Portrait, Paris, 2004, light is a recurring symbol of spiritual guidance. For Nabil the light of the cinema and the light of the sky is one and the same. It is a frequently used metaphor that conveys a connection with the mystical concept of time and the unknown beyond. Higher and Higher—Self Portrait, Vienna, 2005, an image of the artist climbing stairs toward a distant brightness, can be viewed as a suspenseful series of cinematic stills. But upon consideration, one wonders where he might be going. The scenes can be considered a reference to the artist nearing his d"nouement, the end of his movie, his life. “Dying and the idea of death for Muslim cultures are very present. We think about it all the time—in the Qur’an, in prayer, in the idea that we are here to do something good to accumulate ‘good points’—or Hassanat in Arabic—that allow you to go to heaven. We are only here for a short period of time; this [idea] is always there, in my background, and makes me aware of time.” Nabil, the son of a former Christian turned Muslim, is interested in the unifying core of all religions—not where they separate but where they connect. The angel in the work I Will Never Leave You, Self Portrait, Paris 2007, for instance, is a befitting guardian, a spiritual symbol found in many religions and cultures.³²

Though there are interesting points of correlation between Nabil’s work and the history of self-portraiture—the first known self-portrait traces back to the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt³³; the first photographed self-portrait, The Drowned (1840), was a pointed reference to death³⁴ —Nabil’s foremost artistic motivations are not necessarily to link his work to the history of selfportraiture. Nor is he particularly interested in physionomical notions of the portrait as the window to the soul. Nor does he consider the images as postmodern portrayals of the fragmented personae. Moreover, one can find little resonance in Nabil’s work with the brash one-note expressions so commonly found in much of today’s contemporary art. Though it is not difficult to situate Nabil’s celebrity portrait photographs in a contemporary context given the desire for fame and self-acknowledgement so prevalent in today’s culture, it is more enriching, and accurate, to locate his practice within a history of North African photographers for whom the medium is “an artifice against death” and a search for the “impasses of the everlasting.” Nabil is one of a long succession of photographers from this region whom curators Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya describe as developing with their images metaphors of lightness and darkness, and an evocation of childhood memories and “a vanishing past.”³⁵ Nabil, instead, uses photography as an “agent of self-determination” like those included in the canonical Guggenheim Museum exhibition In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present that sought to counter preconceived, constructed and distorted Western perceptions of Africa via photography from the second half of the 20th century.³⁶ Nabil is shaping his identity through the act of photographing those who will be remembered for their creative expression, himself among them.

Perhaps Susan Sontag, who in 1978 wrote, “The cult of the future alternates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past—when images still had a handmade quality, an aura,”³⁷ might have predicted the success of Nabil’s imagery and its poignant affect on today’s viewer. Much about Nabil seems to be rooted in an era past—he apprenticed to learn his craft rather than formally studying fine art; he prefers hand coloring to digital manipulation. Likewise, when asked about his connections to the famous figures he befriends and photographs, he remains unexpectedly discreet and charmingly coy. His artistic vision is a refreshing and timely mix of the romantic and the pure, and yet is deceivingly complex. He is less interested in fame as he is in preserving the past, and preserving every moment of his life. The photographs are thus about both absence and presence, about this life and the next. Nabil lives within each image, within cinema, within the people and places he encounters. And reflexively, the images, the cinema, the people and places he encounters, live within him. Each image is Nabil and simultaneously Nabil as other. Writer Simon Njami so eloquently wrote that Nabil is “observing the world with a poetry that transcends time and place.”³⁸ In the photograph, THE END, New York, 2007, Nabil directs the camera to the television. The pixilated image is a frozen moment taken from the screen and then reanimated with vibrant hues. It symbolizes the old and the new. It represents his nostalgic longing for the past, the need to capture what is fleeting, the desire to exist forever. He writes, “The end of my movie would mean I am dead, that I have completed my life.”³⁹ The words drawn onto the photograph BEAUTIFUL, New York, 2007, may be foreshadowing of the final scene. It reads:

I promise you
It will be beautiful
Really beautiful
At the end.

Melissa Messina, Senior Curator, SCAD
Savannah, February 2010

Notes

1. “Photographic Evangels,” On Photography (Picador, New York, 1977), 122. This quote has been used to convey Nabil’s portrait series as an extension of his self-portrait series which will be further analyzed in the essay. In Sontag’s original quote, it must be noted, the author was referring specifically to the work of Dorothea Lange.
2. “Other Selves in Photographic Self-Portraiture,” The Camera I (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California and Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 1994), 30.
3. Zaya, Octavio. “Twilight: Unfolding Youssef Nabil’s Desire.” From the catalog Youssef Nabil: I won’t let you die (Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2008), 42.
4. “On the Train from Paris to London, April 12, 2008.” From the catalog Youssef Nabil: I won’t let you die (Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2008), 269.
5. Sobieszek, The Camera and I, 32.
6. “In Plato’s Cave,” On Photography (Picador, New York, 1977), 11.
7. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
8. Zaya, 40.
9. Donmez-Colin, Gonül. “Introduction,” The Cinema of North America and the Middle East (Wallflower Press, London, 2007), 3.
10. Ibid, 6.
11. “Introduction,” Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (The American University; in Cairo Press, New York, 2006), 2.
12. Ibid, 5.
13. Donmez-Colin, 6.
14. Karnouk, Liliane. “Photography and Video,” Modern Egyptian Art 1910-2003 (The American University in Cairo Press, New York, 2005), 246.
15. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. “In Conversation with Faten Hamama.” From the catalog Youssef Nabil: I won’t let you die (Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2008), 32.
19. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
20. Karnouk, 246.
21. “Dreaming of Egypt: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema,” SubStance, Vol. 18 No. 3, Issue 60 (University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1989), 85.
22. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
23. Zaya, 41.
24. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
25. Atlas, Natacha. “The Art of Youssef Nabil.” www.youssefnabil.com/articles/the_art_of_youssef_nabil.html.
26. Sobieszek, 25.
27. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
28. “The Exhibition.” From the catalog The Self-Portrait in the Age of Photography (University of Houston Press, Texas, 1986), 7.
29. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
30. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1961), 32. Translated by James Strachey.
31. Conversation with the artist, October 2009.
32. Ibid.
33. Edward Lucie-Smith discusses this self-portrait as being part of a narrative relief of Sakkara in his essay, “The Self-Portrait–A Background.” From the exhibition catalog The Self-Portrait: A Modern View (Sarema Press, London, 1987), 8.
34. This piece, also called Portrait of a Drowned Man, is by French artist Hippolyte Bayard as noted by Reed Massengill in his essay “Our Fascination with Revelation.” From the catalog Self-Exposure: The Male Nude Self-Portrait (University Publishing, New York, 2005), 2-3.
35. “Colonial Imagery, Tropes of Disruption: History, Culture and Representation in the Works of African Photographers.” From the exhibition catalog In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996), 38-40.
36. Bell, Clare. “Introduction.” From the exhibition catalog In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996), 11.
37. Sontag, “Photographic Evangels,” 124.
38. “The Diary of Youssef Nabil.” www.youssefnabil.com/articles/the_diary_of_youssef_nabil.html.
39. “Alexandria, December 31, 2007”. From the catalog Youssef Nabil: I won’t let you die (Hatje Cantz, Germany, 2008), 7.

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