YOUSSEF NABIL

Mad about the boy
Interview by Karen Wright

Youssef Nabil agrees to meet me in NYC shortly before he leaves for Europe. I allow him to choose the location and he selects the sleek yet anonymous bar of the Mandarin Orient Hotel poised high up over Central Park. The afternoon is stormy with tall buildings seeming to disappear into cloud that lends a curious intimacy to the following conversation. It was also appropriate as much of our discussion turned towards the melancholic and nomadic aspects of so much of Youssef’s work.

Karen Wright: I know you grew up in Africa - Egypt to be exact.

Youssef Nabil: In Egypt.

K.W: When did you leave?

Y.N: Well, I’m 37. And I lived all my life actually in Egypt. I only left about seven years ago. But I was always travelling. I was based in Cairo.

K.W: What were your parents like?

Y.N: I’m from a very normal Egyptian family.

K.W: And you traveled because that’s what Egyptian families do?

Y.N: My father was working with an American company in Egypt. Before that, he was working in Europe and was working in Saudi Arabia. Normal jobs – he’s not like one of the rich businessmen. Just trying to give you a general picture.

K.W: Tell me about your parents.

Y.N: I think the greatest thing they have ever done for me is put me in a French school, because that got me very interested in other cultures. I used to save money & buy foreign magazines, I got to know more about art and photography as an art which is something that we actually never had in Egypt. The only art photography we had were studio portraits. And basically, that was practiced by Armenians, old Armenians who had remained in Cairo from before the war. So I left school andI started doing my own artwork when I was about 19 years old.

K.W: And you knew immediately you wanted to be a photographer? Or were you a painter first?

Y.N: I wanted to be an artist. And I didn’t know what to do at first. I used to do a lot of drawings and painting. Collage and videos that I would record from TV and edit and put music on, very late 1980s, early 1990s.

K.W: Did you go to the cinema a lot when you were growing up. It's very much in your work, isn't it? Was it a particular kind of cinema?

Y.N: It was actually the old movies that I was very much interested in. Egyptian old movies, Hollywood old movies… And then I started photographing my friends in scenes that I’d write, that were inspired by these periods. Very glamorous, everything was very well prepared for. Light, the hair, the make-up, everything really just so.

K.W: You styled them?

Y.N: Exactly. I used to take care of every little detail. And I was only doing black and white at the beginning. And then, I had a desire to do color. I had the wish to see my work in color, but I never wanted to use color film. Because for me it gave a completely different character of photography – something that I didn’t feel. So I decided to color the black and white photographs the way that old movies were colored, using the old photography technique.

K.W: So you were self-taught?

Y.N: Every once in a while I’d save some money, and I’d go somewhere. That’s how I’d travel, as an assistant to photographers. The first time with David LaChapelle in New York…

K.W: You met him in a weird way didn’t you?

Y.N: We just met by coincidence. It was meant to be, I believe a lot in these things. I think it’s like when you really belong somewhere, the whole universe just tries to help you get there. It was late 1992 time and I had just started my photography. I was shooting a friend of mine in a hotel in Cairo, and David was staying in the same hotel. He saw me taking pictures and [LaChapelle] approached me and said, ‘Oh, you know I’m working for a Condé Nast magazine, and…’ (I didn’t know who he was – he could have been anyone!) ‘I’m doing this story, and some woman – called I don’t know what – she’s charging me this whole amount of money because I wanted three models… Do you know other models?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know all of them – they’re my friends.’ At that time I was starting to get known a little. I was taking pictures of a few Egyptian celebrities. I called some people for him, I helped him for free. And we became friends! Then he called me from New York afterwards, and he said, ‘I want you to be my assistant, if you can come here to New York and stay with me’ We were only three people at the studio. This was between 1993 and 1994. I used to go back to Egypt and leave again to New York. I was actually studying French literature, leaving school, coming here. I spent five years doing literature – I remember nothing. My family wanted me to have any degree next to my art career or whatever I wished to do. Just to make them happy, I did it, I gave it to them, and I said, ‘Let me go now!’

K.W: David wasn’t the only photographer you worked with was he?

Y.N: The other photographer I worked with was Mario Testino.

K.W: How did you meet him?

Y.N: I met him through friends in Egypt. He was coming to Egypt to shoot Linda Evangelista for British Vogue, and he needed an Egyptian assistant. My friends called me and said, ‘Mario’s coming.’ And by now it was 1997, I knew exactly who he was. He came to Egypt with the whole Vogue team. And I was an assistant there. Then I told him that I wanted to work – to continue working with him. So I went to Paris and worked with him for a year and a half.

K.W: And this was about when?

Y.N: 1997 to 1998

K.W: And then you went back to Egypt?

Y.N: And then I said, that’s it! I don’t want to work with another photographer – I want to go back and have my own exhibit of all that I was doing! Because I was doing my black and white photographs, painting them in New York, in Paris – the work I did in Egypt. I’d never shown them before. My first exhibition was in a small gallery called Cairo-Berlin art gallery. It was owned by a German lady; she was living in Egypt, and she was doing great work through her little gallery in Egypt. But she passed away…

K.W: And so now you’re back in Egypt and you have this show, and then what happens?

Y.N: I had a show in May 1999. And then soon after, a few collectors were collecting me, one of them was the ambassador of Belgium in Egypt – who went to Mexico afterwards. I went to visit him when he was in Mexico, because I always wanted to go there because of Frida Kahlo…

K.W: I was going to bring you back to that because you got into that with David LaChapelle?

Y.N: Earlier, exactly.

K.W: When you were staying with David?

Y.N: Yes, I wanted to go to Mexico. When I was there, I planned my first exhibition at Centro de la Imagen. It’s their museum of photography, really, it’s a great place. So I had a solo show, it was just one year after I had my first ever exhibition in Egypt.

K.W: So they’re showing in a public space.

Y.N: An institution. And things went from there. I went back to Egypt, , and I stayed until 2003, then I was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to go to France for an artist’s residency.

K.W: Where was your residency in Paris?

Y.N: At Cité Internationale des Arts. I was there for three years and then I moved to New York.

K.W: So you’ve never gone back to Egypt…?

Y.N: Only short visits.

K.W: Do you have any feelings about going back? Or do you feel that’s another part of your life?/font>

Y.N: I love my country, but I can’t go back and work from there now.. Like this is one chapter. Basically because I need to feel free in my work, and I was feeling that the country and the society was becoming more and more conservative. And then you have another whole Egypt, as if living in Europe. I was always associated with the real Egypt.

K.W: Tell me about the underwear pieces, which seem to deal directly with this conversation.

Y.N: The guy who was selling the underwear was a religious guy with a long beard, and the whole store had only this kind of sexy underwear with holes and zippers and feathers. And they sell it, I think, for women who are just getting married for the wedding night, just to be sexy. When you’re walking in downtown Cairo, and you see this shop in the middle of the other shops, you feel it’s like a sex shop in Europe or something.

K.W: Mm, it really stands out!

Y.N: It really stands out and behind him is a sign that says he doesn’t shake hands with women. Like, you know, he just stands there. I’m collecting them actually. I’ve started getting them for my work. A good example of what we are passing through.

K.W: It’s interesting because that work makes total sense within the context of being in Egypt. But when you leave Egypt does Egypt carry on into your work? Does that feeling stay in your work, or is that work that you have left behind, in a sense?

Y.N: Well, I think we are all like this: just like fish out of water. I come from there, so I’m always thinking about there, I’m always concerned about Egypt’s problems. Even though like now I’m living in New York, and Europe before that, but I can’t help it. I’m always dealing with issues that relate to my culture and to my own experience. And where I come from.

K.W: And that’s led to friendships with artists who come from similar places. Like Shirin Neshat, Ghada Amer and Mona Hatoum?

Y.N: Yes.

K.W: I am here to talk to you for a magazine called AFRICA. Is it strange to put you in that group when you are often called a Middle East artist as well?

Y.N: No. In many ways, being Egyptian made me feel closer to Africa as well as the Middle East.

K.W: As we've said, movies were incredibly important in the way you looked at things. But movies also informed your whole psyche about life and death, and I think that’s very interesting. I’d like you to talk a little more about this.

Y.N: Well, I think for me, cinema is life. It’s our story, it’s the ending, the beginning, what you do in between. And, you sort of know from the beginning – that it’s going to end one day. You go to see a movie, you know that it is only two hours! Two hours, or three hours, or one hour and a half most of the time and it’s going to end! And that’s the whole thing about life for me…I hope my movie is not a short one and that it’s not going to end soon. But when it’s going to end, it’s just going to end. And it’s crazy, as a discovery, for me.

K.W: When did you discover life was so short?

Y.N: While watching TV. When I was a kid: I used to go home from school and watch TV. And I would watch TV while having my lunch, and I’d watch TV when I was doing my homework, and then I would sleep in front of the TV. (laughs)

K.W: (laughs)

Y.N: It was TV, TV, TV all the time. Watching all of these dramas and Egyptian old movies and stuff.

K.W: Were they like soap operas, and things like that?

Y.N: Actually I wasn’t exactly more interested in this, it was more like any old movies. The point is that I was introduced to a lot of ideas through TV. And as a kid I was always asking my mother, ‘Who is she, and who is he, and where are they now?’ All these kids’ questions. And most of the time, the answer was like: ‘They’re all dead.’ So, it was a shock for me.

K.W: Guess they were old movies! (laughs)

Y.N: To be in love with all of these beautiful, glamorous dead people! And I think it did something to me subconsciously. It was a horrible discovery, actually. I never really recovered exactly from it. Not that actors are dying, but the whole idea that one day it could finish, and it could happen to anyone.

K.W: It happened at a very young age for you, in a sense.

Y.N: It happened for me when I was like five or six. But I think also that it’s personal. For me, it was actually something that opened my mind to other ideas too early maybe. I was thinking about it all the time. And I started imagining that I could lose someone in my family. I used to pray all the time to God that I want to die first, and I don’t want to see anyone I love dying.

K.W: But also, I mean, this thing about watching people sleep which seems to be another theme. in your work. That’s a thing about dying as well, isn’t it?

Y.N: It’s related to dying. I don’t think we just go to sleep and that’s it. I think we travel, we go somewhere. I think when we die it’s going to be more or less like this. We’ll be here but we’ll be just somewhere else. It’s like being in a house, and instead of being on the third floor we’ll be on the first floor, or in the basement or something. But you’re still in that house.

K.W: (laughs)

Y.N: So I think when you sleep (laughs), we definitely go somewhere. For me, sleeping is a metaphor for death. It’s sexual … people look very at ease when they’re sleeping. They look innocent.

K.W: You saw Frida’s house: did it do something to you? Did you feel inspired by it?

Y.N: At that time I had already read so much about her, and seen so many pictures of the houses, that I was a little bit disappointed. I mean, by the fact that they turn it almost into a Disneyland, you know.

K.W: They do this to keep the house going don't they?

Y.N: Keep the house going, have some money coming, et cetera. But the thing is that you know all the pieces are not exactly well kept. There’s no security really. I was visiting it with a friend of mine, and she wrote the essay of my catalogue there and she’s the second important biographer of Frida Kahlo, her name is Martha Zamora. Martha actually met Frida Kahlo. when she was like four or five. And just a year or something before she died, she was in school and they went to visit Diego Rivera – while painting.

K.W: Amazing!

Y.N: And then Frida Kahlo came to visit Diego Rivera. And then she only remembers this woman who was wearing lots of perfumes and she would make noises when she was walking because of all the jewelry she was wearing.

K.W: Yeah, jewelry.

Y.N: And later on she went back to her mother and she said, ‘You know, mama, today I met a woman and she looked like a Christmas tree.’

K.W: Christmas tree? (laughs)

Y.N: And she said, it’s Frida Kahlo.

K.W: Fantastic! But it made such a deep impression that she went home? And told her mother?

Y.N: It did make a deep impression.

K.W: Why do you think she’s important to you?

Y.N: When I came to New York I was working with David. I was supposed to travel with him for the next three weeks – to Martinique– but I couldn’t get a visa. So I stayed in the apartment by myself three weeks going to the office, going back home, and I saw this biography in his apartment. It was Frida's first biography, and I was reading it all the time. So in a way, first she kept me company for three weeks – and then I was really getting interested in this artist. I fell in love with how she looked like from the first minute that I set my eye on the cover.

K.W: Because she’s quite androgynous in a way, I mean maybe that’s a part of her attraction.

Y.N: The fact that she was dealing with very personal issues by exhibiting them.

K.W: Well, the pain she must have been in!

Y.N: The pain that she transformed into art, the way she dressed, the way that her life and her art were one. She was so unique.

K.W: In Mexico, they were free of the marketplace. And the marketplace pressures. Can you imagine artists who could work without having their dealer coming down and saying, ‘I need 20 of those, I need 30 of those, I want that same image, I want it bigger, I want to sell it for more!’

Y.N: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

K.W: And there was an innocence about it. You did it because you had to make it. It wasn’t: ‘I’m an artist because it’s going to make me money.’ It’s: ‘I’m an artist because I have to be an artist, I can’t be anything else.’

Y.N: She had trouble with money all the time. She didn’t have money at all, she owed people money everywhere. Whenever she goes to New York, to San Francisco.. – and her husband was paying lots of this. And then when she got divorced she started doing commercial [work] – portraits of families, but again, all her style. You can feel it’s her. But as you say, she was very free in creating. And she didn’t produce much.

K.W: But why are you so interested in self-portraits?

Y.N: I always did a few when I was younger, and when I left Cairo in 2003 to go first to Paris, I was away from all of whatever I was attached to in Egypt and then I left my country to go to Paris. And I found myself alone … So again I started thinking about life. Not only my life, but about life in general. And about the idea of coming to a place and then leaving. Which is again, related to death. So I started doing self-portraits in different cities…

K.W: Capturing the spirit of the city, in a way! Or capturing the spirit of the people?

Y.N: Mostly because I was a visitor. I knew that I was there for a week, or three days, and then I was leaving after. And it’s the whole relation about life – I think we’re visitors. We’re here for some time and then we’re having to go. We will go. So I started talking about this in my work, and that’s how I started actually doing the self portraits.

K.W: Can you remember the first one?

Y.N: The first ever one? Or the first one where I left Egypt.

K.W: The first one that you did after Egypt?

Y.N: The first one was in Vincennes. It was 2003.

K.W: That’s the very odd one, where it’s hard to see you! (laughs) It’s in the woods, isn’t it?

Y.N: You don’t see me. I don’t look at the camera most of the time for the self-portraits. Because actually I don’t see myself! They could be about anyone else. So yeah, I was there in the woods holding the earth, by the river…

K.W: They’re sad, your self-portraits. There’s a sadness in them that you don’t see in the portraits that you do of other people. There’s a…

Y.N: They are sad, yeah…of course the self-portraits are the most personal ones. They speak more directly about my life. Although some of the portraits of other people also, you can feel also some sadness. People are not exactly smiling or laughing when I photograph them.

K.W: I must let you go off to pack you are off to Paris tomorrow. Is it for work or play?

Y.N: Well I go to Paris all the time. First, because I print my work in Paris. and I come back here with it to color it.

K.W: And why is that? It seems a long way to go to get your work printed?

Y.N: Because when I used to live in Paris, I already had a relationship with my lab there. They know exactly what I like…It’s one of those relations. It’s like when you go to you know…

K.W: Your hairdresser? (laughs)

Y.N: Yeah! Or your tailor or your dentist (laughs). Someone who knows what you like. And once you’re really happy with someone, I think it’s very difficult to find someone else!. And you know the thing about New York is that they went digital everywhere. And they can achieve an amazing result with a digital printing. Exactly like a darkroom printing. But the thing with my work – because I work with colors, watercolor, oil, and pastel – I can’t do this on digital paper. So I have to work on the old fiber paper. I’m one of the very few who are still using old photography techniques.

K.W: You’re an elephant, or whatever they call it.

Y.N: I’m happy to travel for that..And then besides that I love Paris. I love Europe. I think New York is amazing for other qualities, but I don’t exactly feel that it’s a real city. People are here to work. It’s very cosmopolitan, you meet so many people, and it has amazing qualities for work that you cannot find in Paris…

K.W: But the culture isn’t here, really, is it?

Y.N: Sometimes it gets stressful for me and I miss something about being in Europe or around the Mediterranean, where I come from.

K.W: You miss café life!

Y.N: I feel at home, I feel at home if you put me anywhere next to the Mediterranean, as you say.

K.W: So what will you do next?

Y.N: What I’m doing right now is my first movie…

K.W: Oh, wow! Have you started making it?

Y.N: Yeah.

K.W: So tell me about the movie.

Y.N: It’s definitely something new. It’s not shot yet. But I’m in the process of getting the funds for production. We’re almost there.

K.W: Is it a feature, or is it a documentary, or?

Y.N: No, it’s an art movie. It’s a short - seven to ten minutes, it’s supposed to be shot in Morocco. And I’m actually leaving tomorrow to Paris and Italy, meeting with people to see actors and casting, and so…

K.W: What’s the story?

Y.N: The story is closer to my self-portrait series, which is about my relationship to life, to death, to existence, to my life, to leaving Egypt, to going to other places. And all of this in relation to death, and to being reborn again somewhere else.

K.W: Because it’s interesting that you’re moving into movies. Because what I love about your photography is its stillness. So doing something quite different. Sometimes you see photographs, and you think, ‘Oh, you know they’ll make movies…’

Y.N: There’s not much talking in this movie. It’s like when you close your eyes and you think about old memories – sometimes they come for you as visions.

New York, March 2010

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