The Sony Gallery for Photography

There will never be another
An icon of a more refined age, Van Leo passes on leaving a vast body of work.
Negar Azimi remembers.

Van Leo took a picture of me last February. Though it was not taken with a sophisticated camera any means—he used a simple point and shoot—it managed to turn out brilliantly. Perhaps it was something about the angle at which he took it, or the way he asked me to lit my head to one side or maybe it was even the sitting room's lighting. I sat that day in the very room in which he had immortalized thousands in trademark celluloid glory, rendering all that fell before his camera's gaze instant icons, seductresses, and film stars. Van Leo, after all, was a master in the art of illusion.

Last week Van Leo passed away in his apartment in the heart of the city's downtown at the age of 80—the result of a heart attack and the end of a four-year bout with poor health. With his passing goes the memory of an era in which high art ruled the photographic realm. He was the last of Cairo's portrait photographers trained in an art that no longer exists and has now been adulterated by color film, mass production and the banalities borne of commercial exigency. Indeed, the age of glamour has passed.

It was a long and circuitous route that led Van Leo to Cairo. Born in 1921 in Jihan, Turkey to American parents who had fled their genocide-plagued homeland, a young Levon Boyadijian arrived in Egypt in 1924 as the family installed itself in the Delta town of Zagazig. Three years later, they would move to Cairo—the sprawling metropolis in which Van Leo would ultimately make his name and hone his art as the city's master portrait photographer.

In school, he was undistinguished. When Van Leo completed his studies at the English Mission College in Faggala in 1939, he enrolled at the American University in Cairo and promptly dropped out. Instead of seeking out things academic in nature as his father desired, he offered his services as an apprentice at Studio Venus on Kasr Al Nil Street. Even that early on, Venus's proprietor, Artinian, noted that the young man possessed a certain talent and decided to ban Van Leo from entering the dark room—presumably in hopes of protecting the secrets of his art from what would surely soon become the competition.

Van Leo's father, an employee at the Eastern Tobacco Company, ceded the family dining room to Van Leo and his elder brother Angelo in 1941 to serve as an initial studio space. The bathroom was turned into a makeshift darkroom and the surroundings were used to props. And so it began with theater actors and cabaret dancers as their first customers. Soldiers, strippers, journalists, intellectuals and cinema stars would soon follow, hoping to be captured by Van Leo's lens in his signature fashion.

It was particularly during these early years of working out of the family home that Van Leo experimented with using himself as a subject. He once estimated that he took upwards of 400 self-portraits between the years 1941 and1943. Some he blew up, others he never even bothered to print. In each, he stretched the self to the limits of the imagination, appropriating hundreds of disparate personas that appealed to his tendencies toward the fantastic. Identity for Van Leo was wholly malleable.

Representations of the man in the past have focused on one aspect of him only: a portrait photographer very much rooted in a context that informed his work—in this case, a cosmopolitan Cairo once brimming with would-be glamour icons. In the end, however, his photography defies reductionist attempts at categorization. A 1941 self-portrait of Van Leo clad in a tight black t-shirt with a strip of numbers across his chest—as if a prisoner—is reminiscent of a sleek Armani model of today. Another photo, marked by a stark shot of him wearing a dark robe, turns him into Jesus Christ. Needless to say, the man was far ahead of his time, with a complete body of work that eschews facile definitions.

Though he held Egyptian nationality, Van Leo had a complex, enigmatic relationship with the country he called home—a country that, in the end, was not quite his own. Indeed, Van Leo was situated in an ambiguous in-between, not quite enmeshed in the American community, and simultaneously feeling distinct from the Egyptian masses around him—particularly in a country that has precious little tradition of appreciating art photography.

For Van Leo, the Cairo he felt so much a part of changed forever with the 1952 revolution. Gone were his Greek, Jewish, and Italian contemporaries. Also vanished was an epoch in which manners, civilities, pomp, and glamour characterized photography, and by extension, life at large.

Though he stayed in the end, he never ceased flirting with the prospect of leaving Egypt. In 1952, upon the recommendation of an American friend, Van Leo typewrote a letter introduction to the College of Art in Los Angeles. He was accepted, but opted in the end to remain with his studio—which by that time had moved out of the family apartment and into a prime location only blocks away on what was at the time 7 Fuad Street (now 26th July). Years later, he again pondered a move, this time to Studio Harcourt in Paris, but also decided to stay and hold on to his professional freedom.

Perhaps limitations borne of the Egyptian context became most palpable in the realm of Van Leo's artistic experimentation. Having taken hundreds of nude portraits, he burned most in the last decade as he grew increasingly concerned about a climate in which such photographs anathema. Exhibition curators, journalists and art critics, instead, in that time tended to focus on Van Leo's portraits of such identifiable members of Egyptian iconography as Taha Hussein, Doria Shafiq, Muhammad Abdel Wahab, and Omar Sharif.

But there was more. Unlike fellow American Youssef Karsh and to a certain extent, Cairo's Alban, Van Leo avoided what he deemed the tired, largely uninspired practice of taking photographs of state officials, dignitaries and their like. He would repeatedly declare "I am not a commercial photographer." Indeed, Van Leo would choose his subjects with great scrutiny, with an interest in the potential artistic manifestation of the shot. More often than not he would photograph people for free—simply because they had an interesting face or some unique features. He once remarked, "All of my favorite photos are taken for free for myself because I have the freedom to do what I want… shadows, retouching, anything."

It was within his experimental realm that Van Leo's genius was perhaps most striking as he took great liberties in capturing a look that transcended the commonplace. His aim was not to represent the real, but rather, to negotiate the realm fantasy, and finally, illusion. Manipulating light, retouching the fine lines of a nose, or playing tricks on a stubborn reality in his darkroom for hours on end, Van Leo would manage to turn a Spanish singer into Veronica Lake, a Ukrainian dancer into Elizabeth Taylor, an Egyptian housewife into Natalie Wood. When holding up a shot of Madeleine, a French cabaret dancer at what was once L'Auberge des Pyramides, Van Leo would remark, "From millions of photographs, you will never see another one like this."

Modesty was not prominent in his repertoire of character traits. Van Leo knew very well that his art was without precedent, and finally, in the last few years was achieving the fame it deserved. Nevertheless, under a tough, at times overconfident, veneer there was an artist who simply wanted the world to have access to his life's work. Nothing pleased him more than having his work exhibited internationally as it was these last years in Beirut, Lausanne, and Paris, among other places.

Though he donated practically everything he owned, including every last piece of his studio, to the American University in 1998 as his health worsened, Van Leo kept a single box of prints in his bedroom closet for himself. On the backs of the photographs within were personal notes written in pencil. One particular photograph of a seductive young woman always caught my eye. On the back, he had carefully noted in a shaky cursive: " Elham Zaki. She wanted to be a star."

Inside this box were not so much the usual suspects, but rather those photographs that he had a particular personal affinity for. There was a topless Egyptian woman with her back to the camera whom he affectionately called "The Tiger," a striking Armenian doctor friend with his young wife, and South African dancer Teddy Lane-what remained until the end, his favorite photograph. Lane's face, Van Leo would say, "was a gift from God."

And of course, there was Nadia from Heliopolis, the quasi-subject of the documentary film Her+Him Van Leo made by Lebanese filmmaker Akram Zaatari. Nadia's story was perhaps Van Leo's favorite to recount. It was 1959 and a young woman with a refined manner strolled into his studio, addressing him in perfect French. She immediately started dictating the terms of the sitting: the photographer would take a series of 12 shots with his Roloflex camera, while with each passing photograph, she would discard one piece of clothing-an unexpected occurrence to say the least. The finale-Nadia wearing nothing but a big white balloon-never failed to make Van Leo giggle.

After selling his studio in 1998, Van Leo retreated to the same modest downtown apartment in which he grew up and carried out his earliest work. It was here that he spent his last years, often noting with idiosyncratic dramatics, " I am condemned." Indeed, poor health had rendered him confined to his home, with the very occasional trip to the doctor or exhibition opening. To the audience's delight, he was in attendance in December 2000 at Cairo's Townhouse Gallery when he was awarded the prestigious Prince Claus Award for his lifetime's work.

The interior of his apartment, in the meantime, remained completely untouched, oddly unchanged over these years as if sequestered from the force of time. The overwhelming odor of mothballs invariably greeted visitors upon entry, while the décor, complete with antique gramophone, art deco sofas and chairs, and antiquated television, was firmly circa 1947. Nevertheless, the space had an incredible aesthetic-something about the sharp red chairs and the baby blue leather couches perhaps; the man had taste that proved timeless in the end.

For those familiar with his work, a walk through the apartment was much like entering a museum. A self-portrait of the artist as if in prison was taken in the bathroom, where metal bars on the window served as a makeshift prison. A gorgeous blurred close-up of h is own face was in fact taken through the dining room doors, while a bust of Nefertiti in the sitting room was employed as a prop in countless photographs.

Van Leo's address book was the same one he had used for at least 40 years. One flop through the meticulously categorized "Gentlemen" section and one came upon names such as Rushdie Abaza, Youssef Al Sibai, and Farid El Attrache. The "Ladies" section was equally impressive, with the numbers of Berlanti Abdel Hamid, Mervat Amine, Kariman, and countless other stars who frequented his studio or who were simply old friends.

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And of course there was a constant flow of journalists - or those simply visiting and seeking a taste of a Cairo that once was. One had a grandfather who had been a war correspondent, another had a mother who had been a cabaret dancer during the Second World War on Pyramids Road. These people sought out Van Leo as a living, breathing manifestation of that period's social history.

Though he was often surrounded by admirers, Van Leo, in the end, died alone. He never married, while his brother Angelo left for Paris in 1961, where he still resides in poor health. His sister Alice, likewise, left Cairo and has long been living in Canada.

Nevertheless Ahmad, his helper hailing from Ivory Coast, proved an invaluable companion until the end. Though Van Leo constantly complained about his alleged laziness, the two made a perfect, if unlikely, couple. Ahmad would sit and listen quite enraptured as the aged photographer reminisced about years past with a memory that remained remarkably keen until the day he died. During one of Ban Leo's fiery bursts of anger, Ahmad broke down and told him that he considered him his father.

Van Leo's admittedly dashing appearance at one time afforded him n death of girlfriends throughout his life. His personal letters, all donated to the American University with the Collection, are replete with romantic flare; inevitably, they would end with an absurdly dramatic pronouncement of undying love and devotion from an erstwhile female friend. There was Drury Smith, the South African entertainer, Hilda and Gisela from Germany, Ursula from Switzerland, Maryse from France- the list goes on and on. And of course there was Raga Serag, with whom Van Leo was linked for nearly 17years. In the end, their conflicting faiths prevented any chance of Union, though Van Leo took hundreds of photographs of the young aspiring actress, ultimately connecting her to an already famous Abaza in trying to help her launch a career as a cinema star.

In his last months, Van Leo spoke optimistically about his heath getting better to the point where he would be able to return to the dark room. Other times, he was less ambitious and spoke of simply dining at the Greek Club or spending a few hours sitting in the sun. Perhaps it is only fitting that it was warm, even sunny, the day he was buried in a Heliopolis cemetery.

In the weeks before his passing, I was bringing him prints from which to select for an upcoming exhibition. On one of these days, he handed me a set of faded papers- pages ripped from a desk calendar from the year 1947, no less. On the blank pages, he had neatly compiled a list of persons to be sent invitations to the opening; the list was divided into personalities, film directors, and film stars. A quick consultation with a cinema expert revealed that over three quarters of his list had since passed away. It seemed that an era had indeed come and gone.

Just a few days before his death, a dinner was planned at Van Leo's with Noubar Gueriguian (always Monsieur Noubar), an Armenian artisan who was long friendly with both he and his brother Angelo. Van Leo had donned a sharp-checkered black and white blazer with an inexplicable strip of plastic lining along the collar that made me laugh. He had also shaved off his bread by himself that day-that night was to be a special occasion.

As we walked into the dining room, the sound of his radio emerged faintly with an old Dalida song for all things. Over a dinner of white fish, vegetable soup, salad, and a glass of Beaujolais-Van Leo's favorite-conversation moved from French to Armenian to Arabic to English and back.

At the end of the evening, I bid my friend goodnight and told him that I was looking forward to the upcoming exhibition of his works. He looked up at me from his chair and stated with his characteristic flare, "Remember, there will never be another Van Leo." He was so right, and we will miss him for that.

This article first appeared in Cairo Times, Vol.6, Issues 4 (26 March - 3 April)