Sony Virtual Gallery

The Portraits of Van-Leo

Van-Leo: The Truth of Glamour

by Nigel Ryan

Catalogue essay from the exhibition "Glamour as Genre: The Portrait Photography of Van-Leo," Nov. 24 to Dec. 19, 1996

A young boy peers over the railings of a ship as it sails across the Bosphorus. Istanbul, fading into the late afternoon sun reflected from the sea, is no more substantial than a stage set. The city is a mere trick of the light. There is a smell of salt in the air. A lock of hair falls across the boy's forehead and...click, a picture.

But Van-Leo is someone else too. He is the son of Armenian parents and they are leaving Turkey in the hope of making a new life in Egypt. And it is not a shimmering Istanbul that lies in the background but a history of massacres, of forced marches and pogroms. The boy, a lock of whose hair might have just fallen across his forehead, is a refugee. He and his family are escaping. And click, another picture, though not one Van-Leo would take.

Van-Leo is not the photographer's only name, though it is the one he has used for almost half a century. Before he began taking photographs, and as the boy on the boat, his name was Leon Boyadjian. In 1941 he was obliged to sign his prints Studio Angelo. It was only in 1947 that Van-Leo appeared.

"You need," he says, "to have your photograph taken at least once every ten years, just to know how you looked." It is a remarkable conceit from a man who takes pictures that do not even purport to show how you look. He pores over negatives, using the widest possible film to recast the images that appeared before his camera. Lines he does not like are removed, shadows accentuated or expelled. The print is cropped, parts of the body removed and consigned to oblivion. But he is no caricaturist, no taker of snapshots. Nor should it be assumed that he is interested in capturing anything of his subjects. His photographs have nothing to do with documentation save, perhaps, in the imposition of clear outlines. They have nothing to do with photojournalism. But they have everything to do with glamour. And this is a subject about which Van-Leo knows a lot, not least that it is prefaced on the essential not-thereness of the subject.

"To take possession of the light and the shadow and make them play on a face which only then would begin to give itself away...this dispossession of the self is the first prerequisite of an art which then reclaims the features of a face, the reflections of a buried soul." So reads a typical example of the kind of writing to which Van-Leo has been subjected. Yet in a Van-Leo portrait nothing is given away. He is as uninterested in exposing the "buried soul" as it is possible to be. Surface, not excavation, is what he does, and then only after his fashion. The face in a Van-Leo portrait signifies nothing beyond itself, though after Van-Leo has got hold of it it can hardly be said to even resemble that.

Van-Leo does not view the face as the repository of anything so buried as the soul. He does not allow his portraits to betray even their own surface let alone harden into a depiction of the ineffable. They do not solidify ideas, rather they speak of a sensibility, a sensibility that is the photographer's own.

Take his most widely known image. There is nothing human, or even compassionate, in Van-Leo's portrait of Taha Hussein, celebrated humanist liberal; there is nothing ministerial in his portrait of Egypt's most celebrated minister; nothing controversial in this portrait of Egypt's most famously banned writer. It is simply theatrical. To say this is not to denigrate the photographer's art. Just open any book by, newspaper article on or biography of Taha Hussein and what do you see? You see Van-Leo's version of the man, his iconic creation.

Van-Leo still uses the camera given to him by his father in 1941, a huge contraption made of wood, brass and leather out of which he has contrived to make a living ever since. It is a career, of course, that has had its ups and downs. A one time student at the American University in Cairo, he abandoned his studies to become an apprentice at Studio Venus in Qasr Al-Nil. During the early years of the Second World War he set himself up in his father's apartment, developing negatives in the bath. By 1947 he was in a position to purchase Studio Metro, on Rue Fouad, from "a third rate Armenian photographer who had decided to emigrate to the Soviet Union". From Studio Metro Van-Leo worked deals with the Opera House, and with a large number of the theatres and cabarets then in existence. He would take photographs for their programs in exchange for a little free advertising. And he has remained on Rue Fouad ever since, though the street has itself changed names.

To be natural has always been a very difficult pose to keep up. It is certainly a pose after which Van-Leo never strived. The photograph by himself that he likes most is of a South African dancer, Teddy Lane, who lived in Cairo during the '40s. Lane's face is covered in Vaseline and then coated with sand. The body of the dancer is absent, the face emerging from a black background, luminous and not quite human.

Today a sitting with Van-Leo can easily take more than three hours, for there can be no hint of the spontaneous and nothing is left to chance. For Teddy Lane it must have taken much longer as the Vaseline and make-up were applied, the sand sprinkled across the face, the body hidden in a black bag with a hole left for the head. For Van-Leo transforms Lane's "portrait" into a vehicle for his own aestheticism, an aestheticism that has even less to do with the natural than it does with telling something about the subject.

Van-Leo measures the success of his photographs only in terms of artifice, of stylization, which is why Lane's picture is his favorite. Which is why Taha Hussein was such a perfect subject — the portrait was, Van-Leo says, the result of only two poses. This comes as no surprise. What better model could Van-Leo have than a blind man who chooses always to wear dark glasses? What more could he want from a sitter than his not knowing what he looks like, let alone how he might want to look?

Van-Leo is short, and to use an unfashionable word, dapper. His manners are slightly precious. He is not a person with whom you could argue, nor would you ask personal questions. His manner, like his photographs, brooks no enquiry. Surface is everything. To pry would be ill-mannered. He is, to use another old fashioned term, shy. But certain things he will tell. The entrance to his studio was designed by a close friend, André de Riz, a founding member of Art and Liberty, an association of surrealist artists. Indeed, Van-Leo has himself been associated with the group, and one of the earliest analyses of his work was in Jacques Octavia's essay Surrealisme de l'esprit. It dealt with the Van-Leo who shaved his head and created a series of multi-portraits refracted endlessly, superimposed one on the other. It is a multiple image of someone who has dressed down to dress up, who has exposed his scalp all the better to show what he is not. For someone so conscious of appearances, for someone who fetishizes the glamorous and the well-groomed, the matinee idol and the movie queen, what more appropriate form of self-mutilation exists than to hack at your own hair? And it is this, and no more, that constitutes Van-Leo the sometime surrealist: it is a question of dressing up, of not just looking strange but unnatural.

Disguise is everywhere. Sometimes it is simply a matter of the dressing up box, as in Van-Leo's self portrait as an old man (1942). Props are employed, alabaster busts, false beards, Vaseline and sand. Street vendors are dragged into the studio to be photographed, the writer — in this case Youssef Sebai — is allowed to pose as soldier, the athlete as Rodin's thinker. And in all these examples it is the quality of the contrived that distinguishes the final image.

Partly this was a matter of luck, a trick of the times. For the young Leon Boyadjian had always been in love with Hollywood, with the stills of silent and then talking film stars pinned outside cinemas and reproduced in fanzines. His association with the Opera House and with Cairo's many theatres and cabarets allowed him to produce portraits in a similar vein, of singers, dancers, actors and actresses. Business boomed. It was Cairo, during the war, and people flooded to his studio: the British army physical trainer who wanted exaggerated he-mannish, body beautiful photographs; countless numbers of dancers, singers and cabaret artists who wanted nothing more than to be made to look extraordinary; the housewife from Heliopolis who insisted on 18 photographs, the first posed as she wore 18 garments, the series ending when she had removed them all.

"Why would she want such photographs?" asks Van-Leo, a little disingenuously. "Perhaps," he suggests, "a lover was leaving." But he knows why she wanted the photographs, because he understands being-as-playing-a-role. He understands the simple metaphor of life as theatre.

To emphasize style is to slight content, which is why it is so pointless to look for the character of Van-Leo's sitters. It also means that the images are themselves depoliticized, or at least apolitical. The nostalgia invoked by images of beautiful people in beautiful clothes staring vacantly into space can only ever be the audience's nostalgia. Real life — pre or post any revolution — is simply not like that. Nor does the fact that these are black and white photographs lend anything but a spurious veracity to such an ersatz response. And of us all it is Van-Leo who is most disengaged from the reality he purports to record. He has not just taken refuge behind the camera but taken upon himself the completion of the intricate labors — the hand coloring, the painting out of any blemish, any unsatisfactory line — necessary before the real life sitter can be admitted into his perfect world.

Van-Leo, standing behind his camera and over his negatives, negotiates the great lie of photography, knowing full well that the camera is the most accomplished liar of all. And he has the good manners to take portraits revealing not how his sitters appear, but how they might want to have appeared. The rest is simply a matter of time. For in the perfect world truth will out, and Van-Leo's sitters will have looked exactly as they do.