In 1942 alone Van Leo took greater than 100 self-portraits. Then aged 20, the photographer used dramatic lighting and a dizzying array of costumes and props to reinvent himself many times. In a single picture he was curly-haired and unshaven, with a gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers. In one other, he was bare-chested and pensive as a pipe drooped from his lips. In one more, he wore a necklace and clip-on earrings and smiled coyly on the digicam whereas a costume slipped down his shoulders.
Born in Turkey in 1921 to Armenian dad and mom who then fled the crumbling Ottoman empire, Van Leo (the pseudonym of Levon Boyadjian) grew up in Alexandria, Zagazig and Cairo. He was fascinated by Hollywood from a younger age and picked up black-and-white glamour photographs of American movie stars. In 1941 he teamed up along with his older brother, Angelo, to launch a pictures studio within the household flat in Cairo, remodeling the eating room right into a pictures suite and the toilet right into a darkroom (a lot to the chagrin of his sister, Alice, who turned so fed up with purchasers tramping via the home that she emigrated to Canada).
The 2 brothers made a reputation for themselves photographing the actors, dancers and cabaret stars stationed in Egypt to carry out for Allied forces in the course of the second world warfare, and shortly turned their consideration to Egyptian celebrities. In 1947 Van Leo established his personal studio the place he photographed everybody from athletes and authors to trend fashions and movie stars. His business portraits have been meticulously composed.
On the identical time, his self-portraits—of which he took greater than 400 over the course of almost 60 years—have been offbeat and at instances surreal. “He began doing these self-portraits to study pictures; practise lighting, poses, frames,” says Karl Bassil, the creator of “Changing into Van Leo”, a brand new three-volume ebook that sheds mild on the person behind (and sometimes in entrance of) the digicam. However the behavior continued properly after Van Leo had mastered his craft. “That is the place he's most joyful, playful and humorous,” Mr Bassil provides. “That is the place he's essentially the most himself, with nobody round.”
The ebook accommodates greater than 3,000 photographs bequeathed to the American College in Cairo earlier than Van Leo’s dying in 2002, in addition to the smaller assortment held by the Arab Picture Basis in Beirut. It took Mr Bassil, a graphic designer, nearly ten years to collate the a whole bunch of paperwork included within the ebook. He labored with Negar Azimi, a author who performed dozens of interviews about Van Leo, and Katia Boyadjian, Van Leo’s niece, herself an artist based mostly in France.
The primary two volumes comprise Van Leo’s self-portraits and a choice of his studio portraits spanning greater than 5 a long time. Political, social and cultural change in Egypt is within the background of those photographs, together with the troops stationed within the nation in the course of the second world warfare, the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema between the Nineteen Forties and the Sixties, and the influence of the revolution of 1952, which “fully modified the face of Cairo”, says Mr Bassil. Van Leo’s portraits reveal a shift in clientele, from British, French and South African entertainers to locals from long-established Greek, Italian and Jewish communities, then to completely Arab topics. Many foreigners dwelling in Egypt have been pressured to go away within the Nineteen Fifties—together with members of Van Leo’s household. Angelo adopted his French spouse to Paris.
Van Leo thought-about himself an artist, and referred to as himself the “Man Ray of Egypt”, however his work was primarily business. His photographs of Egyptian stars corresponding to Dalida, Sherihan and Taha Hussein have been broadly reproduced. In direction of the top of the Seventies, as studio portraits went out of favor, enterprise began to wane. Within the late Eighties, in opposition to a backdrop of rising Islamism, he burnt the prints and negatives of his nudes. “It’s over. Pictures is useless,” he mentioned in 1998.
“Changing into Van Leo” presents an summary of the photographer’s most vital work but it surely additionally scrutinises his character. The third quantity accommodates a whole bunch of private letters, paperwork and newspaper clippings, in addition to dozens of private interviews that present intriguing glimpses of a person deeply at odds with the picture he offered to the world. “Was Van Leo a solitary genius, probably the most questing and authentic photographers the Center East has ever identified? A person-boy narcissist…A queer pioneer? Oriental Orientalist? Latter-day surrealist? It’s so arduous to inform,” writes Ms Azimi.
Simply as in his self-portraits, by which he impersonates everybody from a spy to a pilot to Jesus, Van Leo was a fantasist who created elaborate myths about himself. A number of outlandish tales revealed within the native Egyptian press within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties reported that he had travelled to America—a rustic he by no means visited—and turned down marriage to an American millionaire heiress, both as a result of she turned out to be a “crone” of “unnatural ugliness”, or as a result of he needed to return to Cairo to look after his mom. In addition to cementing his place as a number one Center Japanese photographer of his time, “Changing into Van Leo” suggests he might rank amongst its most enigmatic characters, too. ■
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