Colour me beautiful
Negar Azimi finds a photographic legacy living on in downtown Cairo
Stroll by number 18 Sherif Street downtown, the premises of Atro, Studio de l'Art, and encounter a dizzying collection of photographs that hark back to a sensibility and an aesthetic long gone. Peer further in and note that the photographs on display are firmly rooted in the traditions of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In fact, nothing in the studio suggests contemporaneity, for even the latest photography equipment on display dates back to 1978.
In a digital age of high-technology personal cameras, Atro and its Armenian-Egyptian proprietor, Artin Safarian, are virtual anachronisms, purveyors of visual traditions and techniques that have been shelved.
Indeed, while the art of black and white photography in Cairo in the last century was mastered by such portraitists as Alban, Armand and Van Leo, Safarian found his niche in the now-antiquated practice of hand-tinting, a technique that came into vogue in the portraiture of the 1930s. It even made its way into the film industry as the method used to colour black and white films.
Safarian first started hand-tinting photographs in 1958 and 1959 when vacationing Arabs, particularly Saudi Arabians and Libyans, requested the colouring process on their photographic souvenirs of Cairo. Why it was that these groups in particular had an affinity for the practice remains a mystery.
"It was the tourists from the Gulf, especially those on vacation in the summer, that first asked me to colour photographs. So, the market dictated my work," he said.
Back then, a hand-tinted portrait was treasured, while the portrait session was pure performance. There is nothing nuanced or impromptu about Safarian's enormous body of hand-tinted work. Glamour, pure and simple, was the aim of this form of artistic representation.
It was in this fashion that Safarian initiated his trademark practice, providing black and white prints with a distinctive painterly quality through the labouriously delicate use of water colours and oil pencils. Gulf emirs posed in pink turbans. Women wore magenta mini-skirts and young men donned green polyester shirts in Safarian's coloured visions of the city. Pastels abounded in all of his pieces.
On his studio's walls, countless hand-tinted portraits are framed in meticulously decorated plates serving as frames. Safarian collected the plates from the Khan Al-Khalili market, beautifying them with fine plastic jewels and the occasional splash of pink glitter.
Today, Safarian sells these plates along with the rest of the items on display in his studio -- but only for a hefty price.
Nevertheless, amidst the names of Cairo's famed portrait photographers, Safarian's name is rarely mentioned. Safarian did not document Egypt's cinema glitterati, as Van Leo did, nor did he photograph the royal family, as Alban did.
His single claim to conventional fame came from having photographed the voluptuous actress Karima of Maadi in the 1970s. Her portrait hangs prominently in his studio's front room amidst other portraits of film stars and political notables. Nevertheless, these other portraits are what he interestingly terms "photocopies" -- photographs of existing photographs. Pastel-tinted facsimiles of King Faisal, Gamal Abdel- Nasser, Anwar El-Sadat and Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi and others decorate the studio walls. Safarian explains that he has long had an interest in politics.
When asked today what he thinks of the demise of black and white portraiture, Safarian surprisingly expresses little nostalgia for an age passed. Instead, he readily voices his preference for colour, for with its ascent, portrait photography was spared the labour of exhaustive retouching processes. In his words, "things became more simple with colour."
Artin Safarian was born in Cairo in 1925. His father, Kivork Safarian, a translator for the British army, arrived in Alexandria in 1910 by boat via Istanbul and Crete. After the genocide that gripped his native Armenia, Safarian's father returned to his country to save his wife to-be, bringing her to Cairo and sparing her the violence in which 32 members of her family perished.
Six years after young Artin's birth, the family packed up and moved to Bucharest, Romania, where much of their extended family had sought refuge after the genocide. The Safarians remained in Romania for 10 years. In 1941, they returned to Cairo to join the thousands of other Armenians who had made the city their home.
Immediately upon return, a teenage Safarian went to work at Nassibian's photo laboratory, tucked away in a small art- deco passage off what was then Fouad Street and is now 26th of July in the city's teeming downtown commercial zone. There, he started out by trimming passport photographs on an antiquated cutting board. He eventually graduated to the dark-room, where he learned the basics of developing. He stayed at Nassibian's for 10 years.
In 1952, Safarian's father opened a photo shop near Suez that catered to the swelling numbers of British troops stationed there. Business fared well while the British remained in Cairo. It was in Suez that Safarian first stood behind the camera, often preparing exoticised picture postcards in front of false backdrops of the pyramids and the Nile for foreign troops to show those at home in Europe.
Nevertheless, his stay in Suez was short-lived. When the British left, so did the Safarians, opting to return to Cairo and open the studio that now stands on Sherif Street.
Today, Safarian is part of a dwindling group of commercial photographers whose studios persist despite the near-collapse of portraiture as a genre. Precious few names from his own generation remain -- Kerop on Mohamed Farid Street, Garo on Kasr Al-Nil Street and Antro on Talaat Harb Street, to name a few. Almost all are Armenian as the Armenian community effectively dominated the photography market in Egypt in the last century.
Though like countless Armenians Safarian was born and raised in Cairo, he claims that his identity is wholly informed by his Armenian ancestry. Even today, he would sooner chat with customers in French or Armenian than the Arabic that he speaks with an accent. He has visited Armenia four times, the last in 1984. Photographic records of each of his 10-day trips can be found on the studio walls: a smiling Safarian in front of Mount Ararat, Safarian in front of an Armenian church and Safarian amidst the eastern village that his ancestors called home.
"Armenia is our true home. I am among the saved ones, but I was not supposed to end up in Egypt," he says.
Nevertheless, he admits that life in Cairo, and Egypt at large, has treated him well, particularly in his profession with the country's market for portrait photography in decades past.
Today, Safarian rarely receives requests for classic portraits. Most customers passing through seek a standard, uninspired passport shot, perhaps a symptom of an age in which portraiture is in rapid decline. Ten years ago, he stopped taking black and white photographs altogether. He rarely hand-tints pictures, although he might make an exception for the occasional photography aficionado who gives him a black and white portrait to stylise -- a virtual injection of history and the realisation of latent nostalgia.
However, several clients have taken notice of Safarian's ineffable style and value as one of the few remaining individuals continuing an artistic tradition that may soon be dismissed as mere kitsch. Two years ago, he donated roughly a dozen of his colour portraits to the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, which aims to document and preserve the region's rich photographic legacy.
Last spring, a visiting Swedish artist in residency at Cairo's Townhouse Gallery of contemporary art asked Safarian to hand-tint a number of black and white photographs he had taken of assorted landscapes in Sweden. The work was shown at the gallery in March as part of an Egyptian-Swedish collaborative exhibition. The project was subtitled Egyptian Colour on Swedish Landscape.
Others, including Cairo-based photographer Youssef Nabil, have brought attention to the practice by lending a contemporary vision to hand-tinting. Nabil's own portraiture is firmly planted within the realm of art, while his hand-tinted images of Ghada Amer, Natacha Atlas, Pierre et Gilles and Youssra and others have given new life to the practice.
Despite the fact his customers are dwindling, Safarian remarks that he never considers selling his studio. He continues to open his shop at 9.30 every morning like clockwork, caring for the studio alone since having given up the luxury of assistants more than two decades ago.
He often sits for hours in the studio's back room with his sister, Shoushanig, and gazes out onto Sherif Street, a thoroughfare that has changed immeasurably in the 47 years that Safarian has worked there.
Safarian never married, though he and his sister are visibly close, having lived together since her husband passed away seven years ago. In years past, she helped him decorate his trademark frames, while today she dabbles in jewelry design. One day, she proudly displayed a necklace she had made -- a replica of one that was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. The original, she said, sits in the Egyptian Museum.
When asked if he would consider altering the display of photographs adorning the studio's walls and two street- font vitrines, an arrangement that has not changed in at least a decade, Safarian shakes his head: "It is nice this way." Perhaps he is right. Why change what works? Indeed, Safarian's studio and body of work continue to operate in a virtual time warp, a tribute to the persistence of an art form for which the heyday has long passed.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 26 June - 2 July 2003 (Issue No. 644)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/644/fe3.htm