Youssef Nabil's website

Biography

Youssef Nabil was born in Cairo in 1972. He lives and works in New York.

Nabil grew up in Cairo drenched in the cinema of the golden age of 'Hollywood on the Nile', and he recalls with nostalgia the glamour, ease, elegance and melodrama of this world of black and white film.

Nabil's early attachment to the cinema lives on in his photos in a special fondness for mise en scène and choice of settings. He started his photography career in 1992, asking friends to pose for him and act in scenes that he wrote and directed, mostly about loneliness, death and sexuality.

He took the photos in black and white, then hand-colored them using the old-fashioned technique popular in Cairo. "Until very recently you could still find hand-painted movie posters on the streets of Cairo, and in most houses a hand-colored black and white family portrait. This was so much a part of my world

that I decided to incorporate it into my work and combine this old technique with my contemporary images."

In 1992, Nabil met the Egyptian-Armenian studio portrait photographer, Van Leo, and they became friends. "It was a critical moment for both of us," says Nabil. "I was starting my career and he was thinking of closing his studio." There were a lot of similarities between them. "We both loved cinema, we both started practicing our photography from rooms in our apartments, and the first public we had was our families. But we also both wanted to leave and work abroad…" Van Leo encouraged Nabil to leave Egypt because he thought photography as an art form was not sufficiently appreciated there. They remained very good friends until Van Leo passed away in 2002.

From 1992 to 1998 Nabil worked as a studio assistant for prominent photographers in New York and Paris. He returned to Egypt in 1999 and held his first solo show at Cairo-Berlin Art Gallery with the late Renate Jordan. The exhibition was titled Premiere and featured a selection of early work, includingMy Frida, Cairo 1996, a portrait made as a tribute to Nabil's favorite artist and muse, Frida Kahlo. Fittingly, Nabil's first international solo show, in 2001, took place at Centro de la Imagen in

Mexico City, Kahlo's home.

Between 1999 and 2002, Nabil worked for Middle Eastern magazines photographing Arab celebrities such as singer Natacha Atlas, actress Youssra and legendary belly dancer Fifi Abdou. In 2002 he began an ongoing project photographing women artists, including Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin, Adriana Varejão, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Ghada Amer, Marina Abramovic, Zaha Hadid and Louise Bourgeois.

In 2003 Nabil held a solo exhibition at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles. He also took part in the African Biennial of Photography in Bamako, Mali, where he received the Seydou Keita Prize for Portraiture. That year, he was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to take up an artist's residency in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts.

For the next three years, Nabil lived in Paris and started working on a more personal body of work, his self-portraits. He says, "I spent a lot of time on my own, and asked myself a lot of questions about my life and existence. I take the self-portraits in different cities, I felt in all of them that I was a visitor and I had to leave. My

relationship to my whole life is the same, for me it's about coming to a place which is not yours, then having to go."

Nabil exhibited his self-portraits for the first time in Egypt in 2005. The show, at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, was titled Realities to Dreams.

Nabil's work has been presented on numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues including the British Museum, London ; Fries Museum, Leewaarden ; Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town ; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo ; FotoFest Houston, Texas ; Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona ; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris ; Third Line Gallery, Dubai ; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla and Aperture Foundation, New York.

Biography