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More essays on
Van-Leo:

Van-Leo: Master Cairo Portrait Photographer by Barry Iverson, a founding member of the Sony Gallery International Advisory Board (catalog essay from “Van-Leo: A Moveable Feast”)

Van-Leo: The Truth of Glamour by Nigel Ryan (catalog essay from the “Glamour as Genre” exhibition)

Van-Leo's Unrivaled Images of Cairo's Belle Epoch by Fatma Bassiouni

Van-Leo: The Discipline of a Rebel by Akram Zaatari, the Arab Image Foundation

Sitting It Out by Nigel Ryan

Van-Leo: Portraits of Glamour by Pierre Gazio

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."

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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.