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Van-Leo's Unrivaled Images
of Cairo's Belle Epoch
by Fatma Bassiouni
This article was originally published in the Middle
East Times, Dec. 2-8, 2000 and reappears here by kind permission of the newspaper.
The author is director of a forthcoming documentary film about
Van-Leo's life and times.
Van-Leo was a tirelessly busy man whose career as a
photographer achieved immortality. He is the living embodiment of the belle epoch
ideal, the remnant of a golden age. For fifty-seven years he lived a fast and
furious life that began in the Turkish town of Jihane in 1921. There he was born
Levon Boyadijian and there he joined the exodus of Armenians fleeing persecution
in Turkey. But his childhood was not lost to these disturbing realities, and he
arrived in Egypt in 1924, living with his family in the rural town of Zagazig.
His introduction to what became his livelihood and passion, the creative art of
photography, was midwifed on the rooftop of a Zagazig home when he, his brother,
sister and parents posed for a family photograph in 1928. This early contact with
photography instilled in him a fascination for the profession that would culminate
in a career that spanned almost fifty-seven years.
Van-Leo was a master of glamour as a genre; he was in that
respect a forerunner of many of the aesthetic developments of the genre. His photographs
are not only a visual record of a man's times but they are also an account of
the development of an artist and a person. It is a history of his time.
Van-Leo's inimitable aesthetics in portraits, the sheer tact
of his pictures in conjunction with the striking elegance of his sitters provides
an aesthetic jolt that is like walking back into a more rarefied time. Van-Leo's
images capture the personalities in orbit during the belle epoch - from British
army officers, to pashas, to cabaret dancers, actors, writers, directors - all
provide a revealing look at a bygone era that continues to tantalize.
Some of his images have acquired the status of popular icons,
the photographer having been paid the ultimate compliment. Van-Leo's portrait
of Egyptian literary figure and philosopher, Taha Hussein (1950) is such a case.
It took only two poses and a masterpiece was complete.
Photography for Van-Leo is a popular art which subverts pretension.
He has made portraits of many leading artistic and literary figures of pre-revolutionary
Cairo including Rushdie Abaza, Samia Gamal, Doria Shafik, Farid al Atrash, Dalida,
Taha Hussein and countless others. The work of Van-Leo represents one of the most
impressive achievements of the photographic perspective known as portraiture.
His photographs, made over a period of more than five decades, are the result
of patience, reflection, complicity, and involvement.
Van-Leo's decisive move into photography as a profession came
in 1940 when he abandoned his studies at the American University, having spent
his formative years at Cairo's College de la Salle (1930-31) and the British Mission
College (1932-1939), in order to become an apprentice in Studio Venus on Qasr
el Nil Street. When G. Lekegian arrived in Egypt and opened his studio next to
the celebrated Shepheard's Hotel in the late nineteenth century, the intricate
recesses of that area where his studio was located - between Qasr el Nil and the
Opera Square - developed in the decades that followed into a "golden triangle
of photography." Near the center of this golden labyrinth were the studios of
Venus, Armand, Archak, Vartan, and Alban - some of the most celebrated photographers
of the 1930 and 1940s. Among the plethora of these studios downtown, the most
distinguished were almost all Armenian, for at the time photography in Egypt was
the domain of the Armenians. In particular, portraiture became their forte, a
specialty that Van-Leo would later elevate to an art form.
In 1941 Van-Leo left Studio Venus and together with his brother,
Angelo, turned half of the family flat on Avenue Fouad and Sherif Pasha Street
into a studio (the bathroom became the darkroom). His reputation began to grow,
and people slowly flocked to have their pictures taken. The sitters were from
all walks of life: middle-class, socialites, debutantes, and expatriates.
What distinguished Van-Leo's work at the time was a natural
flair for flattering portraiture, together with a strong sense of dramatic impact.
Depending on the aesthetics of the sitter, each portrait was turned into an iconic
creation. Unwanted lines disappeared, light and shadow interplayed on the face,
shadows were accentuated, until all that remained in the portrait was compelling
charm, romance, and excitement; thus Van-Leo midwifed the genre of glamour into
photographic portraiture.
Although the youngest amongst his peers, the generation that
Van-Leo belonged to was different from its predecessors in both its claim and
its right to attention. This august group included, aside from Van-Leo, Alban,
Cavouk and Armand. Theirs was a visual world of aesthetics which was wholly new
and different from the tradition of their masters, their predecessors. The photography
of the "old school" - Lekegian, P. Dittrich, Weinberg, Zola, Kerop - was as much
an imitation of salon painting as it was an art of its own. In Van-Leo's world
photography was glamour, a visual world based purely on the aesthetics of art.
In a medium such as photography where reproduction is based on the cold and scientific
effect of light on film, the human element is often insignificant. In Van-Leo's
work it came first.
If the early years at the family flat and in partnership with
his brother Angelo had failed to live up to their romantic promise, the years
that followed redressed the balance with a vengeance. It was 1939, World War II
was in full swing. Blackouts, restrictions and shortages of every kind provided
constant irritation to Europe. In contrast, Cairo was the simultaneous stage for
polo, parties, espionage, and war plans. The years 1939 to 1945 enmeshed the city
with mystery and turned it literally into a cosmopolitan watering hole, filled
with those actively pursuing the war and those avoiding it. For Van-Leo business
boomed. The city was filled with everyone from the old stagers - Vivian Leigh,
Noel Coward, Miriam Voigt, Olivia Manning, Lawrence Durrell, Cecil Beaton - to
thousands of British Army officers and soldiers, many of whom were cabaret dancers,
actors, and writers who had joined the army to "see the world." It was countless
numbers of these dancers, singers and actors who flocked en mass to Van-Leo seeking
to look extraordinary.
As a result of his newly acquired fame, and the growing clientele,
Van-Leo's productivity swelled to allow him to establish a studio on his own.
In 1947 he left the partnership with his brother Angelo and bought premises at
a strategic location downtown: Avenue Fouad (present day 26th of July St.) and
Emadeddine Street.
His days were busy from his waking hour onward; his career
had taken off. Van-Leo's clientele continued to be Cairo's cosmopolitan community,
and as time passed, more prominent people and personalities arrived: pashas, socialites
and film stars frequented the same studio as cabaret performers and young starlets
searching for celluloid glory. All walks of life passed through Van-Leo's studio.
With glamour as his banner, Van-Leo chronicled the times, the moods, and the style
of the bright lights and beauties of a generation.
Though Van-Leo focused on portraiture in his photographic career,
the viewer of his photographs is rarely struck by any sense of repetition. This
is due to the fact that he was constantly seeking the new in his exploration of
the visual resources of his surroundings. "A face is a landscape," he explains.
Teddy Lane's face was one such landscape. Taken in 1944, this
portrait of a British actor stationed in Cairo with the British troops at the
height of the second World War is in itself an unmatched image and a technical
feat. Out of the darkness emerges a head that feels and looks like the head of
an Etruscan god. In order to convey this texture of a stone sculpture, the model's
face was covered with Vaseline and then smothered with sand, his bodily existence
carefully hidden in a black sack. Van-Leo's 1944 photograph of Anthony Holland,
a British actor performing in When Night Must Fall at the Royal Cairo Opera House,
has a surreal film noir sentiment to it. The abstract play of light and dark is
as effective and powerful as the subject itself.
Van-Leo's portraits have a strength that comes from the photographer's
depth of understanding of each character. Asked what attracted him to portraiture,
he replied that it had been always the person's face that interested him. His
photograph of a 1950s street vendor proves the sentiment's validity very well.
It is almost a study of the effects of age, the changes wrought by experience
on a face.
Van-Leo's photographs are underpinned with a sense of authenticity
as well as artistry. The characterizing feature of his photography is a fascination
with finding the beautiful, unexpected, and the charming, in the ordinary and
extraordinary. His photographs exhibit mood and personality, the images of Taha
Hussein, Doria Shafik, Muhammad Naguib or Samia Gamal, Rushdie Abaza and Farid
el Atrash were impressions that reached past the superficialities of their public
image.
One of the great appeals of Van-Leo's work lies in the fact
that he was able to elaborate a visual style and approach which was the photographic
equivalent of the Cairene social tradition of the time. In their largely urban
subject matter, his photographs encapsulate sophistication, the quintessential
expression of the modern city. And no city was more modern or sophisticated than
pre-revolutionary Cairo. Van-Leo's natural milieu was the ebb and flow of the
city's urban crowd, making his photography above all else rooted in that social
milieu, that of belle epoch Cairo and its environs. Thus taken as a whole, his
photographs both trace and celebrate the history, culture, politics and preoccupations
of that class and period.
The 1952 coup d'etat passed relatively unnoticed for him in
his studio. The new status quo ushered in General Muhammad Naguib (the figurehead
who quickly reached his political demise at the hand of Nasser in 1954) and the
Free Officers movement. Just as Van-Leo had done with the pashas of his day, he
continued to photograph whoever walked through his studio doors. In 1952 he was
asked to photograph General Naguib at the Abbassia barracks. The photograph in
its expression of mood and character transcended the superficiality of the officer's
public image.
By the 1960s however the typical Van-Leo subject was no longer,
as Cairo's cosmopolitan community and its Khedivial panache dwindled during post-revolutionary
times. The elegance and sophistication of his time were quickly evaporating. Thousands
of Egyptian high society, Armenians, Jews, Italians and Greeks left Egypt. What
remained was a small diluted circle of nostalgic survivors. Van-Leo's brother,
Angelo - a familiar social figure at L'Auberge and other Cairene watering holes
of his heyday - departed to Paris in 1961 where he established his studio on Avenue
Wagram. Van-Leo himself considered establishing himself at Studio Harcourt in
Paris but the idea was short lived. The artist that he is, he could not abandon
his individuality and his legendary name to become "just another photographer
among many at a studio." Thus he decided to remain in his cherished Cairo pursuing
his lifetime passion and art.
Though the golden age disappeared, Van-Leo continued to aspire
to his ideals and produce his art - the studio portrait. He exhibited his work
twice at the American University in Cairo during the early 1990s. But with his
photographic activity limited in 1998 (he could no longer lift the equipment due
to his health), Van-Leo allowed the responsibility of organizing and displaying
his work to pass on to others. He donated to AUC his lifetime's work and decided
to sell his studio and retire. Retirement seems to signify the final phase of
Van-Leo's career, but with astonishing resilience the 78-year-old lives in his
downtown flat, reminiscing about old times with the occasional visitor.
Today his pictures are not only synonymous with his time, but
exist in a separate right - a record of the artistic concerns and pursuits of
one man. Van-Leo belongs to that tiny band of artists whose jeweled gifts seem
to have been bestowed by the gods - artists whose magic sets them apart from other
mortals and turns them into lofty enigmas. And in the world of photography Van-Leo
is the supreme enigma: a myth in his own time.
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