4 - 10 January 2001
Issue No.515
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 4 - 10 January 2001 Issue No.515 |
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Sitting it out
The foyer was theatrical, though in a low key, end of pier, out of season kind of way. It was modern, in that movie theatre sense -- clean lines, curves, even a hint of the proscenium in the pieces of faded red velvet that ran around the top of the curved desk like inverted crenellations. It had obviously been designed, thought out, was there to make an impression. It is simply that everything will become dust laden in this city. Red velvet fades to a dusky pink and the once elegant blond wood will stain and darken. Nothing, in any case, dates as much as the ultra fashionable and the foyer to Van Leo's downtown studio had certainly aspired to that.
It was designed by Andre de Riz, a friend of the photographer and erstwhile leader of Cairo's one time band of surrealists. A gratuitous piece of information, perhaps, but one that hints at the richer stories that lie beneath the dust. Like so many corners of Cairo, Van Leo's studio on 26th of July Street can barely contain the scent of better times. Seven years ago, when I arrived for what would turn out to be the first of three sittings for the photographer, it had obviously been living off those memories for at least a decade or two.
The studio now is closed, though Van Leo himself has become something of a celebrity and is feted accordingly. Several books of his photographs have now been produced. Last month he received a Prince Klaus Fund Award, presented at the opening of an exhibition of his photographs at the Townhouse Gallery. Nor was the exhibition Van Leo's first: he had earlier been showcased at the Sony Gallery, to which I contributed an essay to the catalogue, and has been exhibited in Europe.
Sitting for Van Leo turned out to be a complicated process. The studio itself, as down at heel as the foyer, and with the same unmistakable odour of better times just beyond recent memory, included a small, circular, slightly raised area, the stage on which the sitter would be placed whilst Van Leo played around with the big, old-fashioned lights. Before taking centre-stage, though, customers would be invited to leaf through box after box of portraits, in search of something they might think appropriate for themselves. Famous faces -- everyone who was anyone, it seems, at some point passed through Van Leo's studio -- punctuated by the unknown, and all dramatically lit in a black and white, silver screen, matinee idol/starlet 1940s manner.
There were any number of tricks that the photographer was willing to play. You could appear shrouded in black, your head protruding through a hole in the cloth, with Vaseline rubbed into your face and sand scattered over the surface, giving the texture of rough hewn granite. You were asked, politely, which was your best side, and the photographer expected you to know. The sitter, he assumed, had at least some idea of the face he or she wished to present: the more stage props you included, the more costume changes you brought, then all the better. This freezing of an image, it was tacitly, though firmly, implied, is not to be taken lightly. It is a serious business, this fixing of your face.
You should have your photograph taken properly at least every ten years, so that you remember how you looked, Van Leo would intone, as he began the time-consuming business of doing exactly the opposite, of taking a picture of a person that perhaps you might resemble, but only on your best days, and then only roughly. Lighting would be worked out meticulously, poses struck and held, and then readjusted. The real work, though, took place beyond the studio, and after developing, while Van Leo pored over the negatives -- he always used the widest available film -- touching up and painting out anything he found unsightly.
Eventually you would be called back to the studio, to select from one of four prints the photographer had deemed satisfactory. This was the final choice: whatever you selected would be blown up, to poster size, the object for which you would pay. The negative remained with Van Leo, you carried only the print away, to do with as you wish.
My choice out of the four images presented did not, I think, meet with Van Leo's approval. He registered a faint frown, asked if I was sure, and then nodded. A week later I returned to pick up the print.
Several months passed before, one day, and much to my surprise, I picked up the telephone to hear Van Leo's voice, asking me to drop in at the studio. This I did the following afternoon, and after pouring a glass of cognac -- he was in celebratory mood -- he produced two enlargements of what I suspect was the print he had hoped I would choose. An unexpected gift, and one for which I remain grateful.
The recent interest in Van Leo's work is gratifying, and deserved. I often find myself wondering, though, given the size of film he used, and his sense of lighting, just what the images looked like before he began on the process of removal, of eradicating those annoying little blemishes that did not fit in with the photographer's sense of the proper.
Van Leo enjoys telling the story of his session with Taha Hussein. The result of this sitting has become the single most used image of Hussein. And it was, Van Leo claims, the only time he had felt perfectly happy with the first shot taken. Hardly surprising, this, for what better subject could this particular photographer have than a blind man, someone who did not know how he looked, let alone how he might wish to look.
Van Leo's photography -- in so many ways an exercise in flattery -- worked best for those immune to flattery. An odd paradox, this, from someone who knew all about the deceits of which the camera, that most consummate of liars, is capable.
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