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Van-Leo, The Discipline of a Rebel
by Akram Zaatari, the Arab Image Foundation
Van-Leo's work raises several questions regarding an
artist's working method and relationship with socio-political powers. These are
the two axes around which I would like to discuss Van-Leo's work, having some
questions in mind, questions that relate mainly to the appreciation of photography
in the Arab world.
Why is Van-Leo's work important?
Is it because he photographed important people like Dalida,
Sherihan, Roushdi Abaza, Shadi Abdel Salam, Youssef Sebai, Taha Hussein, and others?
Then is good photography about taking photographs of important people? Stars?
Is it because he took "nice" portraits of men and women and made them look "good,"
more beautiful than they would expect themselves to be? Then is good photography
about making people look good? Is it because he did successful compositions with
shade and light? Then can good photography be restricted to a perfection of a
predetermined aesthetic model? Would photography become a formula?
When I sat down behind my video camera, right in front of Van-Leo,
I didn't ask any of these questions. Instead, I asked him about the earliest childhood
memory he recalls. I thought he was a photographer who is interested in capturing
images, moods, creating atmospheres that are close to fiction, a photographer
who spent fifty years of his life practicing his work in the same studio, same
location, looking out through his window to see the street changing, in a time
when Egyptian politics, demographics, social customs were changing too. I was
sure someone like him would have something to tell. To answer my question, Van-Leo
described, in detail, how he was running in the schoolyard in Zagazig, chased
by the other kids. He described the scene with much detail. I could see little
Levon as a six-year-old boy, running in the schoolyard, kids running after him,
and the teacher says: "Go catch Levon, he picked the sponge." He looked at me
and said very happily: "I was running and no one was able to catch me."
Van-Leo is still running with that sense of insecurity, almost
with a feeling of persecution that never left either the man or the photographer.
Instead, it lived inside of him until this day and manifested itself in the decisions
he made in his life and his work. Van-Leo felt totally on the margin of society
in art and culture. He had interests that were different than others'. Furthermore,
he never married, and didn't want to lead a conventional life.
He came from an Armenian family which settled in Egypt in 1924,
when he was 4 years old. His first contact with photography must have been through
Varjabedian, an Armenian photographer who photographed him as a child in Zagazig
and who was also a close friend of his parents. Van-Leo's family moved to Cairo
in the thirties, where he entered the American University in 1940, but soon left
it to work with photographer Artinian in Studio Venus. There he learned how to
operate lighting but learned also that Artinian used to light all his portraits
in a systematic way. In this Van-Leo noticed a lack of studying the face of every
individual. He thought of the human face as a unique landscape that possesses
unique characteristics for which light needs to be designed. This is why, a year
later, he decided to open a studio with his brother Angelo, but having no access
to financial resources, the two brothers based themselves in their parents' apartment.
Differences between them led to their constant disagreement, which characterized
their brotherhood and which still does until this day. Angelo was very good at
public relations, whereas Van-Leo was satisfied spending all his time in his studio
and in the darkroom. He admired the work of Alban, who was also an Armenian photographer
from an older generation, and used to visit his showcase often, eager to look
at new photographs.
Unlike other photographers from the same period, especially
Alban, Van-Leo was still doing this purely technical work until the last days
of his career. He refused to delegate technical work to any assistant. He did
the lighting of the scene according to the face, which he gave the highest importance.
He exposed the photograph himself, processed the negative, enlarged it, mixed
the chemicals, processed the print, did the necessary retouching, and sometimes
did the hand coloring. The only elements of the work he didn't do were probably
appointment taking and house cleaning. He is an individualist to an extreme.
There are multiple reasons why Van-Leo's work was different,
ever since the beginning of his career in the early forties. He had an experimental
attitude that was very rare at the time, and perhaps is still rare among photographers
in the Arab world. Back in the 1940s, Van-Leo took more than four hundred self-portraits,
disguised as four hundred different characters. There has not been anything like
this quantity in the history of photography in the Middle East. From a critical
perspective, it doesn't matter if he dressed himself up as a corpse, as a prisoner,
as an inspector, as a woman, with his head shaven, etc., as the intention here
is not to psychologically analyze the photographer's position in all of these.
The importance remains that Van-Leo used photography to display multiple images
of himself, assuming different identities. At a time when nationalism was close
to rising in Egypt, Van-Leo was plotting, encouraging, and promoting that multiplicity
in the look (people's façades, people's landscape), as well as in people's ethnic
and religious backgrounds. He is the antithesis of nationalism, even in a period
when such slogans were prominent at every occasion. Yet Van-Leo was not militant,
but was an introvert who believed in his ideas and his work. This is how it survived
to mark the history of photography in Egypt and the Arab world.
Van-Leo always refused to run after people in power in order
to photograph them. He criticized photographers who often sought publicity, associating
their names with the king or the president, and therefore giving themselves titles
such as "photographer of his majesty the king" or "photographer of the court,"
as did Riad Shehata, as an example. Van-Leo even refused references to previous
photographers in his title, as did Artinian at Studio Venus who used to sign "Successor
of Hanselmann." For him photography is "mazag," an Arabic word that means producing
for the desire of producing, and not responding to a commission, just like what
musicians would say about music. If he likes a model, he asks him or her for extra
poses free of charge. His clients were artists, casino dancers, singers, writers,
famous and ordinary people.
Van-Leo is a disciplined rebel. He held on to his convictions,
but as reaction to a time of little tolerance, he burned many nudes he had taken
in the forties and fifties-a self-destructive act that reminds me of what he did
in his childhood days, when his father got him sandals when he wanted shoes. He
protested by pretending to go to school. He went but imprisoned himself underground
waiting for the kids to finish their classes to go back home with them. Nobody
knew about his absence, and nobody witnessed his protest.
Roland Barthes once said that portraits are a combination of
three elements, first of which is the subject itself, the person in portraiture.
The second element is the photographer's vision of that subject, how he/she sees
or imagines the person in portraiture. As an example, an athlete comes to be photographed,
and Van-Leo decides to make him pose as Rodin's "Thinker." The third element is
the mask, i.e., what the subject wants to look like in front of the photographer,
how the subject wants the photographer to make his picture. I will give the case
of Miss Nadia Abdel Wahed as an example. She came to Van-Leo's studio wanting
to be photographed stripping until she gets completely naked. That's what she
wants herself to look like. When she got completely naked Van-Leo gave her a balloon
to hold. The result is a photograph that has the three elements. That brings us
back to our questions. In my opinion, Van-Leo's importance lies in the fact that
he succeeded in capturing the dynamics of those elements because he treated photography
as a stage set, and designed his photographs accordingly. The people he photographed
belong to a world that is partially his, as if they were actors in a film, which
makes his work closer to cinema.
Maybe Van-Leo was provoked by my video camera. He came up with
a great comparison between black and white photography and the profession of the
traditional tailor, which are both dying because of new technology, because of
mass production. But he added that a photograph preserves its utility much longer
than a costume, at least for the entire life of whomever it refers to. Yet the
popular taste in Egypt, in his opinion, doesn't care anymore for black and white
photography. (Nor does anybody in the Arab world.) He adds that all they see in
a photograph, all they look for, is the color. He said to me: "If I could go back
in time, I wouldn't have chosen to become photographer." But he added: "although
I love my work." But art in his opinion lies somewhere else. It is the lighting,
the frame, the set, the pose, even the print, the retouching. For him art and
craft are inseparable. This is a quality we find a lot among photographers in
the Arab world.
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Van-Leo separated from his brother in the late forties and
settled down in the same studio where he worked for 50 years, and where I met
him in 1998. He was charming like a little boy, speaking so vividly about his
childhood memories. He was angry when he spoke about Egypt, about Nasser, and
about photography. Angelo had to leave when his French wife was asked to leave
after nationalization in 1956, but regrets it now when there is no way to return
back home. Contrary to this, Van-Leo believes he himself should have gone to France
and never come back. Egypt, in his opinion, did not give him the recognition he
deserves. He went for a short period to France in the sixties, but decided to
return back home a year later. He didn't want to leave his studio, which was home
for him. As much as he loved being in Egypt, he was bothered by the transformations
that led to the emigration of the British, French, Greek, Jewish, and Italian
communities who had settled there since the 19th century and had given Egypt its
reputation as the cosmopolitan center of the Middle East. He recalls that his
father spoke seven languages, Armenian at home, Turkish with visiting members
of the family, Greek with owners of grocery stores, English at work since he used
to work for a British company, Arabic on the street, besides French and Italian.
Unfortunately, things now are not like they used to be. He cited an old expression,
which probably originated from the colonial days: "There is no wealth in a country
deserted by the Jews," referring to the role of Jewish communities in activating
the country's economy. Sitting in his studio, he told me: "I should have left."
Then added: "But I love Egypt," as if to summarize a love and hate relationship
that considers photography and Egypt as one.
But perhaps Van-Leo doesn't know that his decision to stay
in Egypt has led to the production of an invaluable document of Cairo society
in the last fifty years. Besides, it has proved that somewhere in the Arab world,
photographers have learned and developed photography as a language and as an art
of signification. Van-Leo's work is an experimentation that remains unprecedented
in the region.
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