YOUSSEF NABIL

Unfolding Youssef Nabil's desire
by Octavio Zaya

Swallowed in the shadows that glow

—Anthony and the Johnsons

My first encounter with the world of Youssef Nabil was a familiar occasion. It was not just because Shirin Neshat had persuaded me to go with her to the opening of the first New York exhibition of her friend, "an Egyptian photographer." The characteristic style of Nabil's photographs—his laborious effort in patiently hand coloring each one of them—which seemed so unusual to my fellow viewers, did not distract my attention from other matters, perhaps less exotic and immediate; rather, it allowed me to feel quite at home, or at least on familiar ground. For me, at that time, this technique, which had seduced Nabil, and which he had learned to master so thoroughly and deftly, was merely a surface effect, beneath which the photographer wove and unfurled a history both personal and contemporary, both his and ours, at once frank and fraught with allusions. But—as I have come to understand—this apparently quaint and seductive enticement on the surface serves also to get across a deeper feeling of belatedness and loss, as if we had missed an experience once offered by a world already in the process of disappearing, and we were made to contemplate, at the same time, the unique image and the singular sensibility of a poet who reflects upon the general decline of culture.

Nabil shares with his friend, the legendary Egyptian-Armenian photographer Van Leo (Leon Boyadjian, 1921–2001), the general background that imbues Nabil's photography with that deathly quality of faded beauty, the decadent elegance of old times, and some uprooted longing. As is the case with Van Leo, Nabil's relationship with film—especially with Egyptian film of the seventies and with forties and fifties classics—is unmistakable, as is his manner of evoking the film-set photography of those sorts of photo novellas that used to advertise or introduce films in movie theater lobbies. (Nabil often portrays himself under the bright lights of marquees).

Film was, in fact, Nabil's first calling, which he later channeled toward photography. And it is perhaps from film that he drew his obvious affinity for melodramatic narrative, which looms over every one of his compositions and most of his self-portraits. The switch was not arbitrary. Photography, like film, is a two-dimensional space, without "depth," disembodied. And, as in film, the scenes and portraits that Nabil composes out of his imagination are suitably malleable for any kind of transformation—they do not offer the slightest resistance to change. This quality allows Nabil to slip through the surface and to project whatever his desire might be: like film, photography provides Nabil with the mirror in which the artist learns to transform himself and where he can play at will. The artist uses different roles and genres, and he grants the same possibilities to his models. Through photography, Nabil loses his identity, in the apparent scenario of the photographic surface where there is nothing of substance, of sufficient weight, or density. But this dissolution of the self is not enough. Nabil carefully hand colors that surface in order to "transcend" its flatness and to "restore" the original, lost dignity of the self. This is an effortful task, redundant, but also belated—as in Konstantin Kavafis's Before Time Altered Them.

This belatedness and that "restoration" do not suggest a tangible reality, but rather, on first glance, as in the movies, an escape from "reality," thus seeming to point toward a locus of desire, a space of endless deferment, dominated by a (hand-colored) image that casts doubt upon the existence of the real and of our ability to know it and experience it, and that has become the space where we "truly live." In the context of that space, Nabil deliberately flirts with certain notions of the exotic that at times seem to border on Orientalism. I don't mean to say that Nabil's photographs identify or even confront what supposedly stands as a more or less discursive framework to dominate the victimized Oriental. I believe, instead, that his photographs slip through the irregularities, insecurities, and heterogeneities that derive from an anxiety of coming after what has come before; a sense of displacement of time and space, sometimes projecting a scenario of disorientation and loss, and sometimes seemingly longing for a coherent, perhaps more "authentic," other. The situation is complicated by Nabil's fondness for representations interweaving unconscious fantasies, sexual imageries, desires, fears, and dreams that perhaps require a closer exploration and understanding of the relations of these fantasies and desires with history and culture. I should quickly add, however, that Nabil's photographs vacillate 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 the stereotypes and discrepancies of colonial desire—and the melancholic resignation of its impossibility in the age of general globalization and commodification. Nabil is aware of the fact that all cultures are undergoing a profound process of globalization, and that understanding this process as a mere Westernization amounts to ignoring and overlooking the profound cultural movements coming out of the Islamic world, Japan, and other strong economies in Asia that are transforming the world in such a way that we can actually talk about the Orientalization of contemporary cultures.

Furthermore, Nabil's photographs seem to embrace the erosion of the distinctions between high and low culture—which in his work could translate as an effect of the process of globalization, the universalizing presence of mass culture, the culture of obsolescence and the pervasiveness of ever-changing lifestyles. But facing the general leveling effect and indifference of mass culture, he seems attracted to recreate a past form of culture to redeem the self from the simulation and emptiness of contemporary cultural forms. This apparent contradiction is characterized by the ambiguity or ambivalence between his subjects and his style, and the tension that results from what appears as stereotype and what appears as difference, and the presumed conflict between strangeness and familiarity.

As I suggested before, what is particularly interesting about Nabil's photographs is the way they try to crystallize all those subjects, interests, and concerns through some of the devices, languages, and genres of cinema. Youssef Nabil not only decides and designs his sets as if he were a movie director ready to shoot a scene, but he also carefully prepares and arranges his models accordingly. A good number of his photos, and most of his self-portraits, could easily pass for film stills. In every case there is a strong interest in, and attention to, narrative. So much so that some of the photographs could be fragments of a photo novella. But Nabil's is a narrative in its insatiability, its deferral of satisfaction; a permanently elusive object of desire. For these photographs seem to tell us a story, but we don't know what it is about, its beginning or its end. Many of them have a mood of quiet despair, some a sense of waiting, melancholy, and resignation. Many of his subjects do not show their full faces, many give us their backs, many are in bed, mostly sleeping … And, as it is with narrative and with desire, any closure becomes an arbitrary resolution.

But then there are other subjects—characters, if you will—who play a parallel role in Nabil's stories. They are also related to Nabil's never-ending fascination with cinema—this time, its glamour and stardom. They are international celebrities by their own right; singers, actresses, visual artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers such as Naguib Mahfouz, Louise Bourgeois, Natacha Atlas, Shirin Neshat, Rossy de Palma, Julian Schnabel, John Waters, Mona Hatoum, Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin, Ghada Amer, Marina Abramovi´c … They are Nabil's icons, colleagues, and friends. And they also represent—as in the case of the sempiternal movie star—the elusive yearning for immortality, an immortality that warrants desire forever and fixes it in time, as a fossil. As Nabil once declared, "When photographing people I always think of how to make this moment eternal, before they die or before I die."

I believe that throughout his work, Nabil has realized that, in the age of fallen idols, fifteen seconds of fame, commodity, and obsolescence, eternity might also need some restoration, some hand coloring. Everything else is fake, fulfilled desire. As he puts it: "Nothing is complete, and nothing will remain the same."

Octavio Zaya
New York, 2008

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