Nabil Boutros:
Of departures, prayers and the soulful night
A spiritual convenience
Profile by
Youssef Rakha
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photo: Youssef Rakha |
Entering Nabil Boutros's family home in Heliopolis is somewhat like walking in on the set of Youssef Chahine's Alexandrie pour quoi. The flat is spotless; everything is in order and well maintained; but the style, the colours, the spacial arrangements are so typically 1950s Christian middle-class one suspects nothing has changed since long before Boutros departed in the mid-1970s.
Encounters with his photographs, notably at a Centre Français Culturel exhibition last Ramadan, evoked an image of meticulous, almost hygienic detachment; and the information that he has lived uninterruptedly in Paris for close on three decades reinforced an impression of distance -- so much so that one expected to meet a reticent, sophisticated Frenchman.
Yet the house alone was sufficient to dispel any such concerns; and Boutros turned out to be not only unassuming but garrulous -- Egyptian in the most pleasant sense of the word. His life in France, he says, is largely "a matter of circumstances," a convenient arrangement that, rather than being consciously planned, simply fell into place. And his concern with being Egyptian has to a significant degree influenced the course of his present career.
Born in this selfsame flat in 1954, Boutros had a relatively priveleged upbringing. His father was a state council judge, he supplies reluctantly; the family circumstances in which he grew up were hardly sympathetic towards art. "There was general culture, but no artistic culture as such," he explains.
Yet, contrary to the impression he is eager to give, his recollections suggest a degree of esthetic indulgence. "When I was in thanawiya amma --" a student at the De La Salle -- "in chemistry and translation classes especially, because chemistry was incredibly boring and I was so good at translation I hardly needed to pay any attention, I would have a small lump of wet clay hidden in the drawer, and I would use the tip of my pen to carve faces into it, moulding it with my hand." He had a few friends, not many, he says; and though he refuses to admit there seems to have been a sense of social or cultural displacement.
Another episode he only mentions only in passing concerns "a Czech person who taught me to use gouache colours," a private tutor. "I remember making a copy of Van Gogh's self portrait, the one that has a severed ear, without even knowing it was Van Gogh. It was a very good effort, but I felt there was something wrong with it, something lacking, and I got so annoyed with this feeling in the end I tore it up, though it was very good. I don't know why I felt this way."
Boutros went to the college of fine arts in 1972. "I spent two or three years studying decorative arts. I was very happy there," he reflects. "I was the second in my class because I was an excellent draughtsman. But something was lacking, something I couldn't really specify." Though Boutros speaks of "a yearning to discover art, a passion for all that was there to see, to learn and to accomplish, a need to go as far as I could," there seems to be a missing link at this point in the story, an event or discovery that Boutros will not divluge.
"I sold some of the paintings I was making, financed myself and went to France. It wasn't easy, but it was still possible, legally and economically speaking, to start a life over there. And I just about managed..."
In Cairo Boutros had begun to take photographs of places -- a casual pursuit, unrelated to painting. It was an activity he resumed in Paris where, in 1980, having braced financial difficulties and confronted "an ocean of knowledge in which one could easily have drowned," he graduated from the College des Beaux Arts.
"It was a form of surveying, if you like, but it was driven by the urge to document spaces that I related to, perhaps in ways I couldn't as yet make sense of. This interest in place is something that has persisted, the urge to externalise my perception of a particular space."
To make ends meet -- the family had made it clear he would have to finance himself -- Boutros worked as a secretary and an archivist, among other jobs. He made copies of paintings for the Louvre. "My technical ability as a painter weren't worth much at that time in France, so I used it to make money," he says.
Art history helped him stay afloat in the aforementioned ocean, providing powerful references, notably Rembrandt. "To this day whenever I go and look at his paintings in Amsterdam I end up weeping. They are all self portraits, even his pictures of saints are self portraits. There is such humanity in his pictures, the freedom with which they are charged. From the visual ambiguities of the night he tries to extract a different truth, and this is very important for me. I've encountered many great artists, but the ambiguity, the chiaroscuro in his pictures places the whole thing in the service of a certain spirituality which makes them incredible; and maybe it is this spirituality, this alternative truth that I've been looking for in my night pictures -- notwithstanding the difference, of course."
One of the first jobs in which he envisaged a long-term career was stage design. "It was due to this interest in place," he explains, "which was soon to be established. What fascinated me about set design was that, with a few subtle shifts of props or lighting, you could transform the same space, open up a completely new dimension... Next February," he tentaively announces, "I will embark on designing the sets for a new play here in Cairo. Thus the cycle comes full circle.
"A person does not change," Boutros says. "The things you are looking for in your whole life -- they are one or two things, even if they take many forms through the years."
Towards the end of the 1980s, Boutros felt it was urgent that he should make decisions about the future course of his life.
"There was this tripartite interest -- in the places that I photographed, in the theatre and in the materials of painting. Black and white photography provided me with a necessary distance, because I needed a certain realism -- a realism that's not all that lifelike. And the notion of something created using a machine -- the restrictive discipline this entailed. What I sought was a form of imagination derived from what is outside the frame. The most important part of the picture -- what you cannot see in the picture. I concentrated on intimating a story, the elements of which are implied in the picture but will only fully materialise outside it -- in the viewer's imagination.
"So if you photograph these two settees and the little table with an ashtray full of cigarette butts and half empty cups of coffee, including that curtain thread that has come undone there, you're really saying that someone was here, that they smoked cigarettes and drank coffee, that they were in the presence of this thread. This is the kind of thing I was looking for -- a certain presence, unseen within the actual frame of the picture. There is a kind of spirituality to it -- that you want to talk about something you cannot see, like the smell of a house in which you lived as a child, the smell of a certain meal that comes back to you from a distance. The pictures should evoke things that are present but intangible -- but they have to be reasonably universal, not only personal -- that other people have experienced and will hopefully share with you when they see the picture..."
In 1988 Boutros made the final leap of faith: he would be a photographer. Already assignments were piling up, making finances less of a problem. (Today -- married, with children -- he is highly sought after as a photographer of paintings, concerts and, notably for Al-Ahram 'sAl-Beit, interiors. His pictures of folk performance, Alexandria and the Copts -- the bulk of what he considers his real work -- are likewise widely collected; and, though he has yet to publish a book, he has been featured at the Guggenheim, among many reputable venues and events.) Among other positive influences, Boutros had met sculptor Adam Henien in Paris, and had started reading Edwar El- Kharrat, whose writing was to inspire an extended series of pictures of Alexandria.
"They are my godfathers, though Edwar doesn't like me to call him that, saying I could be his younger brother. They are both very young in spirit. When I met Adam in Paris he played a very important role in my relationship with Egypt, through his work and his presence and my relationship with him. He drew my attention to the Egyptian aspect of my work, and he was the reason I reassessed my connection with Egypt, my search for an image of Egypt, of a changing Egypt..."
Despite having settled down comfortably, after all, in 1990 Boutros was in the throes of an identity crisis. He had not been to Egypt for ten years, and he was reconsidering all that had passed.
"I had been too busy flapping about fighting for dear life, now that I was more or less safely afloat I began to think again about Egypt. I wanted to understand what this Egypt was, and whether or not I was Egyptian. So I decided to come here with a medium-format camera to talk to and make environmental portraits of people -- no specific group of people, just anyone and everyone. I used the same frame, the same focal length, the same everything. I wanted to produce very articulate pictures, very high-resolution images. And I wanted to avoid there being any confusion about what I was doing. A medium- format camera on a tripod allowed me to load slow film and made it very clear to the subjects that they were being photographed.
"People on the streets gave me the best pictures," he says. "Actors and writers gave me nice pictures too, but they knew how to be photographed. The people on the streets give unconditionally. I went on doing this, whenever I could afford to come back from 1991 to 1995. And when I had enlargements made -- one metre by 80cm enlargements -- I was scared. These people were there, in the gallery space. In the end they proved to be very powerful pictures, even though everything was kept very natural and simple -- no effects or artistry of any kind. But the people were present..."
Eventually this drive to discover Egypt -- "camera and tripod on my shoulders, scaling Al-Mu'iz Street and whether I'm having a completely useless day or an unexpectedly productive one, working hard to find out and to photograph" -- would settle into a pattern. Whenever it is financially viable, he would come, though more often with a 35mm camera and plenty of fast film. On the present occasion, for example, Boutros was here to photograph the various manifestations of Ramadan for an upcoming exhibition, and to be present at his Centre exhibition of night pictures. Back in Paris, he seldom photographs and never travels except on assignment, storing his creative energy for when he next comes to Egypt.
"Circumstances were such that I moved in the direction of art," Boutros says as we sip the last of the espresso. "And my passion for art took me to France and forced me to struggle there until I found my calling. But by the time I had reached something, when my struggle was finally over, I realised I couldn't survive on what I was doing here in Cairo; and everything had already been settled here. So I solved the problem by being constantly between the two countries, by coming here a lot -- to do the work I enjoy the most."
