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Van-Leo: Portraits of Glamour
by Pierre Gazio
This essay first appeared as a Zeitouna book published by the
American University in Cairo Press in 1997 and appears here by kind permission
of both Zeitouna and AUC Press.
The story begins in perhaps 1928 or 1929, on the flat
rooftop of a house in Zagazig. An Armenian photographer focuses his lens on a
family group, also Armenian. There are no studio lights, just the light of day;
and the pale, faded gray of the photograph, which still exists, shows a little
boy with a fringe across his forehead and his socks well pulled up.
Such was Van-Leo's first contact with photography, and his
fascination with this new world led him back again and again to visit the photographer,
spending hours on end in the studio. Many years later, when he gravitated to photography
as a profession, it was this same jobbing photographer from Zagazig who introduced
him to Studio Venus on Qasr al-Nil Street, Cairo. There Van-Leo, then still called
Leon Boyadjian, a rather unmotivated student at the American University, learned
the technical background to the business--although his employer never really taught
him how to take a photograph. Perhaps he feared a future competitor.
At that time, Armenians held a virtual monopoly on the profession,
following in the footsteps of G. Lekegian, who had arrived from Istanbul—like
Van-Leo's family—around 1880. The situation of Lekegian's studio near the
legendary Shepheard's Hotel gradually turned the area between Qasr al-Nil Street
and Opera Square into a golden triangle of Cairo photography. The dominance of
Armenians in this field no longer appears strange when seen in the context of
an Egypt where a quasi-guild systems still existed and certain professions were
the exclusive domain of specific communities. The Greeks ran the cafés and grocery
stores; the Italians had engineering and print shops; the Maltese were lawyers
or journalists. With an oriental sensibility but free of any religious prohibition
on representational imagery, the Armenians were probably best placed to introduce
and develop this latest and bizarre manifestation of western technology in Egypt.
Although many of them (like the proprietor of Studio Venus, who specialized in
shots of gas stations for Shell) may have seen this new profession only as financially
rewarding business, the art of the photographic portrait was also to become an
Armenian specialty.
Out of the mass of undistinguished studios certain names emerged,
those who would produce truly creative work: Armand, Archak, Vartan, and above
all Alban, who before settling in Cairo had managed to secure a flattering reputation
and flashy renown in Paris and Belgium. Van-Leo, however, was to become the perfect
autodidact. Since childhood he had collected cinema magazines and photographs
of Hollywood stars. By continually poring over these images he learned that to
photograph meant grasping light and shade and playing them over the features of
a face in order to reveal--or indeed transform--them.
In 1940, the war filled Cairo with thousands of men from all
over the British Empire and allied countries. To entertain these restless soldiers,
there came theater troupes, music hall artists, and dancers of less than modest
charms. This mass of humanity wanted to forget, at least for a few days, that
the world was in flames, and they proved a godsend for photographers and merchants
alike, who saw business boom. Seizing the moment, Van-Leo set himself up, rather
modestly at first, in a room in the family flat. The bathroom became the darkroom.
Soon, demand was so great that he asked for assistance from his brother Angelo,
who would eventually establish his own studio. The two brothers had the idea of
photographing entertainers, British or local, free of charge in exchange for advertising
space in the theater programs. As the audiences were mostly soldiers wanting,
at best, a souvenir for themselves or, at worst, a last image of a lost loved
one for the family, the Studio Metro of Van-Leo and Angelo welcomed a growing
clientele of portrait seekers.
In 1947, Van-Leo bought premises on Fouad Street from an Armenian
who was leaving for the Soviet Union, and he has continued to work there to this
day. His customers then were the cosmopolitan community of Cairo: society ladies
and starlets dreaming of the silver screen, pashas with waxed moustaches and brylcreamed
Levantine lotharios, British civil servants and cabaret artistes. Exactly who
is sitting in front of the lens is less important for the photographer than the
fact the each face is a new discovery for this art that he gradually masters and
that, through the alchemy of the developing tray, will produce deceptive reflections
of reality. The celebrities were to come, but in the meantime he was not above
photographing weddings, which ensured an increasingly comfortable income.
The reception room of the Studio was decorated and furnished
by Angelo de Ritz, a painter friend of Van-Leo and one of the founders of the
Egyptian surrealist group "Art et liberte." This friendship and surrealist connection
was not merely fortuitous, as evinced in an article entitled "Surrealisme de I'esprit,"
written by Jacques Ovadia and published in 1950 in the revue Je dis. Moreover,
it grasps a striking instant of the artist at work:
"Meanwhile, in Studio Metro, between an exhibition gallery
and well-known establishment and across from an enormous building, a fellow with
a brilliant smile and lively eyes, bending over prints or studying a profile,
conjures up the entrancing phantoms that populate the most beautiful of people's
dreams."
Over the years Van-Leo was not content simply to become more
accomplished in the art of portraiture. His imagination led him to view the most
discordant aspects of reality, and his prime model--himself--underwent distortions
and metamorphoses through which a different language of appearance was elaborated.
On one occasion he shaved his head of its prophet's mop of hair and trimmed his
beard to a fine moustache and goatee, to take on the fearsome look of a prince,
cruel and freshly exhumed. He then composed two self-portraits in a montage where
his face is duplicated and transformed, creating for himself alone a most disquieting
fiction. This desire for radical transformation, springing from his fascination
for actors--those masters of make-believe--was combined with a taste for games
and fantasy, a fact repeated in all the articles written about him at the time.
From 1950, Van-Leo began to sign his work with his own name
(until now it had carried that of his brother), a name that he constructed from
an anagram of his Armenian name, Leovan. When asked why, he replies ingenuously,
"All the other photographers had chosen simple names: Vartan, Armand, Alban. I
wanted a double name to distinguish it and attract attention."
Was the unconscious at work here, or mere coincidence? The
name has a Dutch ring to it that recalls those painters who mastered the effect
of chiaroscuro. However that may be, it is in the use of light and shadow that
Van-Leo excels.
As his reputation grew, so the famous became his models: the
singers Abd al-Wahhab (sporting a wig) and Farid al-Atrash (in front of the fancy
frescoes of his apartment); the film stars Omar Sharif and Rushdi Abaza; the writer
Taha Hussein, who came with his wife and secretary. Their portraits share the
walls of Van-Leo's studio with unknown clients, especially women. On the back
of some of these latter photographs, a rather discreet yet resonant phrase is
written in pencil: "Had great sympathy for me." It is perhaps the most singular
paradox for a photographer claiming to defy the passage of time that an anonymous
face, an image divorced from its forgotten original, should substitute the memory
of a living, perhaps once loved, person. But is this not also the inevitable price
of an art that Van-Leo transformed into a juggling of appearances and pushed to
extremes that are ever further from reality? This also explains his preference
for unknown models who could be subjected absolutely to his inspiration without
the constraints of resemblance demanded by a famous face. Prominent personalities
could not be submitted to those long sittings under the spotlights that can conceal
or reveal the details and expressions that will turn the most banal face into
a unique work.
An article published in Cairo in 1951 writes that "this human
face, whose presence, whose surfaces and angles haunt him, is the face on which
he wants the play of light and shade to be the echo of a secret magic that he
alone recognizes. He once said to me in his curious, almost Slavic accent, 'A
face is a landscape.' His eyes held the look of a melancholic yet precocious child."
It happened, however, that a famous sitter also became the
subject of a masterpiece. With just two poses, Van-Leo managed to draw from Taha
Hussein the most impressive and beautiful of his portraits, illuminating the writer
with an artificial light more subtle than the sun that he could no longer see.
When confronted with a character as powerful as Hussien, then at the height of
his renown, Van-Leo had no need for either long settings or the pyrotechnics of
flash that can reshape the conventional geography of a face with no particular
appeal; nor did he resort to the ultimate trickery of retouching the negative.
In a similar manner he took an unexceptional South African actress, reclining
on a length of velvet with her long, blond hair spread behind her, and transformed
her into a heavenly being, a goddess floating upon the golden depths of her waving
locks.
Van-Leo's own favorite shot is a portrait of a young man, one
of those actor-dancers who inhabited the cabarets and theaters of Cairo. This
photograph exemplifies what the French poet Aragon called mentir-vrai (true lies),
that is, the shifting of reality toward the imaginary and yet without it ever
disappearing. It is truth born of deception. The model's skin, smeared with Vaseline,
has the look of stone, and the head, as from a statue, had been lifted by lighting
that would seem to deny any corporeal existence to float on a black background.
Van-Leo felt that something was still missing. And he had the idea of mounting
a fragment of mirror that would throw a small triangle of light onto the model's
neck. His satisfaction with this portrait may come from having, this time, eluded
the element of chance that infects every photograph, in that one can never really
know, despite the most perfectly controlled technique, just how the picture will
appear when lifted from the developer.
It has often been suggested with regard to Van-Leo, and other
portraitists of his type, that he gives his models the image that they themselves
would dream of. It would seem more probable, however, that such pictures reflect
the most urgent, if unclear, dreams of the photographer himself. The faces and
bodies are materials, and the work done on them is influenced only by the esthetic
and desires of the man behind the camera. Those curvaceous women with full lips
and dark, made-up eyes, and the dancers, twisted by a restrained lasciviousness,
more clearly betray a personal conception of feminine sensuality that an expression
of the model's own ideas.
Certainly, there were also those searching for celluloid glory.
Young Italian or Greek women would come to the studio with cases of costumes convinced
that by imitating characters on the cinema posters of Cairo they would open the
door to success. Reproduction and pastiche had been, of course, one of the first
lessons for Van-Leo when he tried to recapture the ideal of beauty as presented
by the film magazines and glamour shots he collected as a child. One can imagine
his pleasure when he applied all his technical prowess and eye for minuscule detail
to photographing the participants of a look-alike competition organized by the
Journal d'Egypte in 1952. Coming to the aid of those who saw themselves as the
doubles of Ava Gardner or Clark Gable, using all the tricks of his trade to recreate
the poses and lighting of those far-off stars, signified for him the very sum
of that confusion of features and appearances into which the real--and not truly
interesting--identity of the model sinks and disappears.
In Egypt and during his summer trips to Europe, Van-Leo has
photographed numerous exterior views. Having no control over the caprices of daylight,
he plays instead with the framing of the shot, accentuating the unusual to twist
the perspectives of such well-known forms as a Venetian canal, a boulevard in
Paris, and even the pyramids of Giza. The pyramids have also been subjected to
his manipulation of shadow, waiting for a passing cloud to create black triangles
in a shining landscape. One of his favorite sports was to climb the Great Pyramid,
and from the summit he has photographed its immense shadow stretching away from
the invisible monument. His few shots of Cairo streets are mostly of cinema fronts
rendered fantastic by the massive publicity hoardings. It is all part of his surrealist
approach to track down aspects of enchantment in everyday life that go unnoticed
by the ordinary passer-by. It is quite revealing that human figures are rare in
these photographs and are usually reduced to furtive pedestrians or vague silhouettes
half framed in a window. Street scenes and people in motion hold no interest for
Van-Leo. He wants a face or a body completely within his power, enclosed by the
silent world of his studio. If he encounters a beggar, or a barrow boy, or an
oddity whose face intrigues, he removes them from their environment to fix them
in the web of his spotlights. For every one, the ritual is the same: they must
undergo a more or less extended wait in the reception room while, under the pretext
of conversation, Van-Leo observes them, looking for the attitude or fleeting expression
that he will later try to capture.
"I want to guess," he explains, "at that secret of a soul hidden
behind appearances."--When it exists. More often, in fact, the appearances on
which a photographer works reflect nothing more than themselves, presenting just
a faithful copy with no depth and with no more significance than the image staring
out from the false mirror of a sheet of mat paper.
And today, those who enter the large studio room, dark and
chill as a temple, feel strangely intimidated as if they are about to take part
in some rite of initiation, the actual events of which are still unknown to them.
In the center stands the great brass and wood camera that his father gave him
in 1941. High-standing spotlights surround a semi-circular dais and a simple red
chair. Time then vanishes for Van-Leo as he repeats the gestures and movements
that he has made on thousands of occasions over the last half century: stepping
over cables, lifting an armchair, repositioning one of the heavy steel spots.
Reduced to immobility on his perch and blinded by the powerful light, the subject
begins to feel like an object, seeing nothing, hearing just a singsong voice telling
him to move the hand, the neck, the eyes and to hold a pose sometimes until it
hurts. This willing passivity, this self-negating is the primary requisite for
an act that will repossess the features of a face so that there might emerge,
between light and shadow, as if floating to the surface of the dark waters of
a dream, the image of an unknown, who nonetheless is recognizable as oneself.
Van-Leo barely noticed the Revolution of 1952. The events of
the outside world would never excite him as much as those that went on in his
darkroom. Customers were just as numerous, anonymous and famous (even if the Free
Officers had replaced the pashas), and they ordered prints without worrying about
the cost. However, the foreign communities were gradually withdrawing from Egypt.
His brother Angelo, a prominent figure in the Cairo nightlife, a lover of cabarets
and champagne cocktails, and the organizer of roller-skating competitions, left
for Paris in 1961, where he opened a studio on the Avenue de Wagram. In France
for the summer, Van-Leo considered a similar move and so inquired about work at
Studio Harcourt, where the biggest names in entertainment and literature had their
portraits taken. He was too much of an individualist, however, to be just one
photographer among others, and he chose to return to Cairo for good. In any case,
photography--for him a passion, an art, and a profession--still seemed to have
a promising future in Egypt.
Nevertheless, the world around him was ebbing away. Of the
hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Armenians living in Egypt,
there would soon be no more than a handful of nostalgic and bitter survivors.
From the room where Van-Leo still retouches his negatives, where nothing has changed,
he now sees a different, clamorous, crowded Egypt pass by the window. It is an
Egypt he no longer understands. The black limousines of Fouad Street (now 26 July
Street), the elegant ladies in made-to-measure, and the house servants in striped
satin gallabiyas have been swept aside by a population unconcerned with old world
manners, a population whose noisy gaiety is foreign to the sophisticated esthetic
of Studio Van-Leo. His darkroom is no longer that sealed space, sheltered from
the tumultuous world, where the photographer as creator-god brings forth a universe
in black and white from which all ugliness must be banished. Van-Leo belongs to
the school of which Cecil Beaton and Horst were the most extreme practitioners
and which wishes to present only what will beautify existence and astonish and
seduce the observer. Unlike photojournalism and the snapshot, which seize a person
in the midst of life (whether suffered or enjoyed), the studio portrait does not
really teach us anything. It guides us toward a certain pleasure of art, where
the artificial disposition of space and light can open doors to the imaginary.
Van-Leo's greatness as photographer owes nothing to the seeming exoticism of the
place or his Armenian origins, nor to having been witness to a short-lived golden
age. His greatness lies in the fact that he is to be counted among the small number
of demanding and solitary portraitists who have become the poets of representation.
©1997 Zeitouna. Translated
from the French by Colin Clement. First published 1997 The American University
in Cairo Press.
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