Van Leo, Revisited

I'm having a lovely, lazy day at home today, mostly spent avoiding ridding out closets and cupboards in preparation for an upcoming jumble sale (Susan Boyle may look like a Barbara Pym character, but I'm living the life of one). As a result, I've been dealing with some digital jumble, clearing out files and folders, and ran across the following, which have put me in an Egyptian mood.

Many months ago, back when the Café was just a wee thing a few weeks old, we looked at remarkable photographs taken by Van Leo, who lived and worked in Cairo from the start of the Second War until nearly the turn of the century.

There are few things that more strongly conjure up Egypt's vanished past than his pictures, whether they are of glamourous film stars, as here in this study of the lovely Kariman;

Or of forgotten transients through the city. Here is a portrait of an English dancer called Katie Grey, as elegant as an ancient Egyptian bas relief.

His work could be quite straightforward, as with this study of actor Rushdi Abaza, a mid-century matinee idol...

Or hauntingly evocative...

This is the profile of a young Adonis known only as Nubar, a common Armenian name in pre-revolutionary Egypt. All we know is taken from the photographer's (wistful?) note - "immigrated to the U.S.A."

Van Leo's self-portraits take many forms, casting the artist as everything from a dapper man-about-town to, as here, a bearded desperado.

We often watch old Egyptian movies, Mr. Muscato and me, and we are especially riveted when they include location shots. We watch Omar Sharif or Laila Mourad or any of the great stars as they walk down a tree-lined street or enter through the revolving doors of a downtown boite and wish we could have lived in that city, seen that place that now exists only in traces and crumbling corners. We would certainly have paid a call, or more than one, on Van Leo...

Picture This: Van Leo

Cabaret Dancer, 1940s

Fragments of old Cairo remain: the crumbling buildings that line the downtown streets, the faded cafés, the antique shops in backstreets full of Déco light fixtures and chipped sets of cocktail glasses.

And in the photographs of the master of Egyptian portrait photos, Van Leo.

Self Portrait

In the photographs of Van Leo, old Cairo comes alive - the Egypt of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, when it was a cosmpolitan country at the center of Arabic culture, film, finance, and intrigue, home to thriving commnities of Armenians, Greeks, Italians, English, French (not to mention the tens of thousands of Egyptian Jews whose absence today is a unspoken one).

He was born Leon Boyadjian, and as late as the turn of the century was a presence on the Cairo scene. One of the great proofs of my idiocy is not having been photographed by Van Leo while I lived here...

He is remembered for his intense, saturnine self portraits:

Which did, sometimes, show more than a flash of humor - as here, pictured as a gaucho:

He photographed le tout Egypte, people like intellectual and feminist (and possessor of the most expressive eyebrows this side of Miss Crawford) Doria Shafik:

But he was somehow most at home in the city's demi-monde, photographing the actresses, dancers, and hangers-on who filled the nightclubs and waited for their Big Chance:

He worked, as a studio and movie photographer, mostly unheralded outside Egypt, for his whole long life. He even, during her time in Cairo working with Youssef Chahine, photographed Dalida:

And who could ask for more than that?

There has been something of a renaissance in interest in Van Leo of late, as attested by this gallery with essay tributes from the American University in Cairo, as well as this gallery of almost demented glamour focusing on his entertainment photos.