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Van-Leo: The Chronology
by Veronica Rodriguez
AUC Presidental Intern and Curator of the Van-Leo Photographic
Collection
Catalogue essay from the exhibition "Van-Leo: The Chronology,"
Mar. 20 to May 10, 2001
On December 12, 2000 Van-Leo was proclaimed--simultaneously
in Egypt, Holland, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, India, China, Pakistan, Ivory
Coast and Indonesia--winner of the 2000 Royal Netherlands Prince Claus Award,
making him the first photographer ever to obtain such a distinguished honor. In
tribute to Van-Leo for receiving this prestigious prize, the AUC Rare Books and
Special Collections Library in conjunction with the Sony Gallery is privileged
to exhibit about one hundred and sixty photographs from six decades of Van-Leo's
works.
The chronology of Van-Leo's photographic legacy has its roots
in Cairo, which was first a refuge for his family--an Armenian family, fleeing
in the early 1920s the painful Armenian legacy in Turkey. But Cairo became more
than a refuge; it became home and inspiration for a young emerging photographer
who was born Levon Alexander Boyadjian. His childhood fascination with Hollywood
stars led Van-Leo to dream of discovering the bewitching ways in which light and
shadow could capture on film glamorous icons like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
Van-Leo relates: "When I was 17 years old, I started to collect Hollywood film
star cards. My father would give me 5 piasters with which I could buy ten 6x9
photo cards."
To enter Van-Leo's home is as if a time machine had transported
one back to 1941, to the precise spot where countless stories of ambition and
genuine stardom had been captured by Van-Leo's spellbinding talent. As I sat in
the living room, I could breathe the vanished social history of Cairo that Van-Leo
photographed over the course of his fifty-six-year career, and smell the fragrant
perfumes of those good-looking men and women, waiting patiently to be immortalized
by Van-Leo. His aim in photography was that the end product would be a piece of
art that would engage the eye of the beholder, who would wonder in disbelief whether
the subject was real or just a figment of the imagination. Indeed, it was Van-Leo's
keen eye for photography that would allow him to picture the image he desired
to see as if it were already a finished photograph. Nonetheless, it was his limitless
imagination and his meticulous diligence that led him to discover the ways in
which light and shadow can be manipulated, for Van-Leo had the talent to metamorphose
an ordinary face into an exquisite piece of art. Thus, the portrait of May Medawar,
an unknown young woman in search of film stardom, tricks the eye into believing
that she is actually Vivien Leigh, the stunning Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the
Wind.
In a similar way, many have mistaken Van-Leo's portrait of
his friend Nubar, an Armenian civilian working in Egypt during the 1940s, for
Elvis Presley. Van-Leo says that he was inspired by the movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, with its famous theme of the two darkly opposed sides of man, and its intimation
that on separating the two, man can become liberated. Jekyll succeeds in his chemical
experiments and transforms into the horrendous criminal Hyde. As Dr. Jekyll, Van-Leo
succeeded in his experiments at the studio, manipulating the lights from different
angles, and patiently spent endless hours in the darkroom, mixing various chemicals
in hope of replicating the exact light-effect he had seen on the cinematic Jekyll
at the moment of his transformation into Hyde.
Analogously, Van-Leo's photographic magic transformed an ordinary
Armenian young man of the 1940s into a strange anticipatory double of Elvis Presley,
then an unknown Memphis teenager. Van-Leo insists that this portrait, which is
one of his favorites, can be fully appreciated either horizontally or vertically.
Beyond the theme of good and evil, Van-Leo also confronted
the most unequivocal of human destiny: death. This is best seen in a fascinating
1945 self-portrait in which Van-Leo superimposes a series of negatives to produce
the illusion of a man succumbing to his ultimate fate. This mysterious picture
is thought-provoking. Intrigued by its esoteric meaning, I questioned Van-Leo,
who said that its message was that "there is no escape from death regardless of
social status." He explained that one figure in the photograph reflect the suffering
of life. Another shows that the time of death is approaching: "He is furious!"
exclaimed Van-Leo. The third figure is itself the image of death. This self-portrait
was highly considered in his nomination for the 2000 Royal Netherlands Prince
Claus Award, and was published in that year's Prince Claus catalogue. Why was
this picture so powerful? Van-Leo might say it encapsulates the reality of life,
which is death.
Historically, this message on the inevitability of death can
apply metaphorically to the fact that the fine glamour that only black and white
photography can capture was turned to ashes by the emergence of color photography.
Thus, Van-Leo's self-portraits in color after the 1970s show only a captured moment
in his own life. Color photography did not offer Van-Leo light and shadow with
which to experiment, to create an image that would inexorably engage the observer's
imagination. The difference between Van-Leo's early portraits and later ones is
startling; the later ones reflect his by now familiar uses of color and relaxed
snapshot in contrast to the very heightened artistic and experimental quality
of his earlier artistic self-consciousness.
Perhaps it was Van-Leo's fascination with ancient Egyptian
history that influenced him to explore the obscure themes of death and immortality.
He recalls spending endless hours in his room reading everything about the life
of the Pharaohs, whose obsession with the afterlife led them to build the Pyramids
of Giza. In fact, Van-Leo was quite fond of photographing the Pyramids of Giza
during the course of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. A good example is the famous and
unsurpassable photograph of the Great Pyramid of Giza viewed from the Mena House,
from the same room in which the world leaders Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin
met briefly during World War II.
Van-Leo's career as a professional photographer began during
World War II, when Cairo became a staging center for troops from throughout the
British Empire. Theatre troupes, singers, and dancers were brought to entertain
the soldiers, often via the well-established E.N.S.A. (Entertainment National
Service Association), which staged lavish performances at the Royal Opera House.
This was to be the final crowning period in Cairo's belle epoch. For Van-Leo it
was an opportunity to establish his career as a master photographer of black and
white portraiture. As Pierre Gazio points out, the Armenians had the monopoly
in the field of artistic photography in Cairo's guild-like divisions of influence
within the foreign community. These famous (in their time) photographers included
Armand, Archak, Vartan, and above all Alban, Van-Leo's favorite, who had obtained
a high rank in Paris and Belgium. In 1941, one room of the Boyadjian family flat
was turned into a studio by Van-Leo in partnership with his older brother Angelo,
who would leave Cairo to open a studio in Paris. Van-Leo's professional career
began in earnest. Many foreigners, both entertainers and military, would become
his clients.
However, this glamorous foreign society vanished from Cairo
after the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. The advent of nationalist and republican power
dissolved the monarchy along with the British military presence and profound political
influence. Fortunately, Van-Leo had also established by then a clientele of leading
Egyptian personalities. They included Tharwat Okasha, the revolutionary cavalry
officer and art historian who would serve as Minister of Culture, and Youssef
Sibai, also a literary-minded cavalry officer who would serve the revolution as
Secretary-General of the Supreme Council for Arts, Literature and Social Sciences,
Minister of Culture, head of the Egyptian Press Syndicate, and Editor-in-Chief
of Al Ahram. Sibai was a personal friend; they shared a common passion for cinema
(most of Sibai's many novels were turned into movies).
Even before the revolution Van-Leo had photographed Doria Shafik,
the Egyptian feminist leader and journalist. Like the earlier and more mannered
photo of Taha Hussein, Van-Leo's picture of Doria Shafik has become iconic, and
appeared most prominently on the cover of Cynthia Nelson's biography "Doria Shafik
Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart," published by AUC Press. Van-Leo's association
with the Egyptian film industry also predated the revolution. Among his most memorable
pictures are those of the Lebanese musician and film star Farid Al-Atrash, the
Druze aristocrat who found a refuge and a career in Cairo, and the singer, composer
and actor Mohamed Abdel Wahhab. To this same late pre-revolutionary period belong
his glamorous (but no longer extreme) photographs of Faten Hamama; Amira Amir,
an oriental dancer as well as a film star; Sabah, the Lebanese singer; and Samia
Gamal, perhaps the best known oriental dancer to star in Egyptian films.
Although Van-Leo remained a bachelor he was by no means a monk.
He enjoyed the company of women who were to achieve stardom thanks to his photographs,
such as Ragaa Mohamed Serag. Van-Leo discovered her, photographed and befriended
her, and in time she would be hailed in the Cairo media as "great actress" and
"the queen of beauty." Ragaa was not alone in finding friendship and fame. One
of Van-Leo's girlfriends from Austria called him a Casanova, understandable if
we consider his intense good looks as a young man, reflected in many of his 400
self-portraits.
But even more than the departure of the pre-revolutionary foreign
community from Egypt, and the tendency of any revolutionary epoch to downgrade
the glamorous and the exotic, it was the accession of color photography in the
mid-seventies that undermined to a certain degree the high aesthetic that characterized
his work. Now customers wanted their portraits in color, so Van-Leo reluctantly
began to photograph them accordingly. Van-Leo still maintains that color photography
is not well suited for portraiture, though it can work well for weddings, group
shots, and passport pictures in which the face of the subject corresponds (however
flatteringly) with reality rather than with that almost abstract commitment to
glamour that characterizes Van-Leo's earlier and most self-consciously artistic
work.
Indeed, as Nigel Ryan carefully observed, Van-Leo's black and
white photos rarely have to do with documentation: "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…Van-Leo measures the success of his photographs only
in terms of artifice, of stylization." As Ryan also observes it is Van-Leo's photograph
of Teddy Lane, taken in his high-aesthetic period that the Rare Books exhibit
has categorized as "Inspiration, Imagination, and Illusion," in which this dimension
to Van-Leo's work is most extreme.
Like the masters of medieval icons who had no concern for physical
perspective given their spiritual and essentialist priorities, but no doubt could
have provided it if they had any reason to, Van-Leo could document according to
conventional canons, but he did so significantly enough only with inanimate objects,
which are reflected in this exhibition with his photos of Egyptian antiquities
and of monuments. Yet even here, his aestheticism creeps back into the perspective.
He photographed from an inclined angle a row of palm trees in El-Marg, the minaret
of a mosque, an obelisk in Cairo, and the bell tower of Sacré Cour Basilica in
Paris. Curiously, the inclination of both Middle Eastern and European monuments
recalls the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Just as Beethoven conducted his orchestra with legendary musical
genius, Van-Leo ordered his studio with an extraordinary photographic eye. "I
am like a film director," says Van-Leo. "The customer has no idea what to do."
Further, Van-Leo was a dedicated student of the famous European artists, including
Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Rodin, and Rubens. Through his unparalleled
ability to mimic the pictorial effects of famous painters, Van-Leo transformed
an ordinary man selling spoons in the streets of Cairo into the echo of a painting
by El Greco, whose emotional style and strong contrast of color and light vividly
expressed the passion of the Counter-Reformation Spain. Much like El Greco, Van-Leo
asks this nameless old man to express his unquenchable desire to survive. And
as was so often the case, it was the simple fact of this man's "interesting face"
that inspired Van-Leo to take this picture and entitle it "A Man Struggling for
a Living."
Despite the advance of color photography, Van-Leo had built
such a reputation as the master photographer of black and white portraiture that
as late as the 1990s Libyans, Saudi Arabians, as well as Europeans continued to
come to Cairo to have their photos taken by him in black and white. By then his
customers or sitters also included a number of journalists, photographers, and
intellectuals who were part of the growing expatriate community in Cairo and many
of whom were Americans associated in one way or another with the American University.
As the theme of the 2000 Prince Claus Award was "Urban Heroes,"
Van-Leo was a fitting honoree; his exceptional talent for black and white portraiture
created and perpetuated a glamorous genre in Cairo, one of the world's great urban
centers, as it underwent drastic political and social changes.
It is the good fortune of the AUC Rare Books and Special Collections
Library to have become the home of Van-Leo's Photographic Collection, consisting
of over 19,000 negatives and 16,000 prints. This is an artistic and cultural treasure
that represents a historical record of the past fifty years in Cairo. The Library's
intent is to preserve Van-Leo's Photographic Collection for future generations
and to exhibit it to appreciative audiences in Egypt and abroad.
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