Shirley Johnston:
From Mississippi to Sohag in search of villasBreathing life into spaces
Photo: Sherif Sonbol
It is early in the grounds of the Zafarana Palace, now home to Ain Shams University's main administrative offices. The heat has settled in on campus and the arrival of university staff has began some time ago. The extensive grounds are littered with cars.
Amidst the commotion, dressed head-to- toe in austere off-white and adorned with a summer straw hat Shirley Johnston stands at the entrance to the palace asking incoming cars if they could -- perhaps -- park somewhere else. Her photographs, she attempted to explain to them in perfect English and patchy Arabic, needed to look a particular way.
"Every single car," her photographer, Sherif Sonbol, recalls -- the tension of the moment now serving as fuel for laughter. "In a place like Ain Shams it's an impossibility."
Shirley Johnston, though, insisted.
"I told her we could just edit the cars out on photoshop," he continues, a half-smile breaking his otherwise solemn face. "But this made her angry," he laughs. "She wanted the facts, the reality. She said that photoshop is for people who can't take pictures."
The comment silenced him fast, and the quest for that one perfect shot continued over many days and endless hours of meticulous deliberation.
"At Zafarana there was a big war," Sonbol recalls shaking his head and smiling. He is obviously fond of Johnston's persistent precision. "We were moving between two spots, not more than 50 centimetres apart," he continues. "At 200 metres away from the palace 50 centimetres make very little difference."
Except to Johnston.
"I want perfection," she says, looking at Sonbol teasingly, then turning and explaining her work ethic. "Shot for shot has to be perfection and great. It has to be that you turn page after page, one after another, and can't believe how great it is. With 40 locations and over 300 chromes, that requires concentration and patience. It's not easy."
American-born Johnston arrived in Egypt three years ago to embark on the third in a series of picture books capturing great 19th and 20th century villas around the world. Commissioned by art publishers Rizzoli, Johnston glided from the glamorous houses of Palm Beach to the great villas of the French Riviera, recapturing in photos and text the life of each villa, and the spirit of a time and place.
"Eugenie often was seen alone by the rocks near the sea, a distant silhouette of black against a brilliant canvas of blue," begins her vignette on Villa Cyrnos in Great Villas of the Riviera. "Yet it was a great pleasure for the widow of Napoleon III, exiled for 20 years in England after the fall of the Second Empire and now fast approaching seventy, to explore the famous chemin des Douaniers, the narrow and winding stone pathway of the old border patrol down by the jagged rocky coast facing her Villa Cyrnos. With her gray hair tucked into a big black straw hat, black-tinted glasses, a billowing black coat cut to clear the ground, and walking stick in hand, she headed out each afternoon into the tangled web of indigenous green wood and pine forest of secluded Cap Martin."
"In this book," she writes in her Riviera introduction, "we talk about some famous people, but this isn't a tourist guide to celebrity places and we don't talk about present day owners. Most of the villas have changed hands, often more than once. Some have changed structurally, and often redecorated. But, this isn't a catalogue for a real-estate company or an auction house, nor is it like the usual genre of image books on architecture or decorative arts, or like articles in decoration magazines.
"We treat our pages like a silent movie screen. But we've tossed out the cardboard. Our "stills" accompany stories about the original owners, who ranged from European aristocrats and grand bourgeoisie families and parvenus to American expatriates. They all had strong personalities and definite ideas about creating original, luxurious, and grandiose vacation villas up in the hills outside the bustling resort towns and out on the secluded rocky capes with their spectacular views of the sea. This book isn't a history, it's an aperitif to whet the appetite of those who would like to go and know more."
It could, however, very easily be a history. While Johnston by profession is a journalist -- once a head-hunted reporter for the Wall Street Journal -- she is now a storyteller, by default, a historian.
"I'm also an archaeologist," she laughs. "They think they're making great discoveries on the Discovery Channel, they should see what I'm finding out here."
Take the Antoniades Palace in Alexandria.
"Ask anyone who Antoniades was," she continues, "and you get the same answer. Some rich Greek guy. But who is this rich Greek? No-one really knows. It took piecing together lots of bits of information."
Months of research, interviews, letters, phone calls and trips to the Greek consulate in Alexandria followed. Weeks later -- after another round of digging -- Johnston found the facts; the owner, the architect, and the history behind the palace.
"Manial is the same," she says, leaning forward to realign a pile of books on her coffee table. She fiddles with them, making sure they are aligned with the side of the table. "The documentation on most of the palaces is far from comprehensive. And at times I've encountered mistakes."
Finding the facts, verifying and re-verifying, explains the state of her apartment. With the exception of the staple ashtrays, vases and frames, the only real adornment are books. Piles and piles.
"It's all I have with me," she says. "This is just my working library for Egypt," she adds quickly, alluding to its meagre state relative to her entire collection. "When you do a project like this you have to read everything you can get hold of -- not just about the place, but around it, about that period and around the period. In every language possible."
In the case of Johnston this includes Arabic, French, Italian, German Greek and English.
"With help of course," she smiles.
While those in Cairo's architectural arena are quick to commend her knowledge, some local historians may not be so keen.
"I don't want to say anything to offend anyone," she says, "but I've come across inaccuracies in texts, and in what people tell me. Asking about one of the palace gardens, one name kept coming up. But the gardener had been dead for over 80 years by the time the palace had been built. I could put down that name and reference it, but it defies what I'm attempting to do."
"When I first started doing these kinds of books many years ago, there were some picture books out there, but they were more like the old houses that were doing them for many years -- art and architecture. So the text was a straight-forward descriptive text, without a real development of the story in any way. It was more of a history book. Then in the 1980s and 1990s these kinds of books took off, magazines took off, and then a lot of those books became magazine-type books, then all of a sudden people were making vanity books. Which is why I've had people surprised when they find out that I actually do my own books. They think like everyone else I have someone doing the work for me."
"I feel people don't really understand what I'm doing or why I'm here for so long. The process of writing isn't as appreciated or understood as it should be. I don't answer my phone, and people can't understand why. You wouldn't call a surgeon in the middle of open heart surgery and expect him to talk to you. Shakespeare wasn't worrying about picking up a cell phone, was he? It may not be surgery, but the process of writing is very much the same. It's just as demanding, and requires just as much concentration. And it's just as important. Just different."
For three years, Johnston's life has been the book.
"With a project like this, you can't really do anything else parallel," she says. "Not even a social life."
Her pleasure is an evening walk, or occasionally the thought of one.
"Like I said it isn't easy. Many people are famous for starting projects like this, but few can finish. Doing this book is like training for the Olympics. If you want to win the Olympics, you can't win them on crutches. And just like every millimetre counts in each shot, every word counts in the text. It's like chiselling out text and requires going over and refining, mood, style, changing verb tenses. I can spend 12 to 15 hours writing each day."
The end result are books that quickly go into multiple editions. Not that she is counting.
"Once the book is out of my hands that's it, I've done my part. I happen to have it on my bookshelf, and I may glance at it, but it's no longer mine. To some people the end-goal is having their name on a book. In that case, they gather text, pictures, go to a publisher, tell him here's the material, here's the money for it, and in that case the publisher really acts as a printer. Other publishers will only publish with a vision, without an eye on whether the book will sell or not. But like in any business you find all sorts of things."
Johnston is worked-up, restless in her chair, restless with her hands.
"To produce new material, new writing, all new work, original work, and not recycle the old things and package things and sell them off, it's meaningful. But the problem is that the market is so uneven, so all over the place, that the average consumer wonders 'what am I looking at?' It all seems the same unless the marketing department makes a point of promoting it in a certain way."
She comes to a sudden stop, shakes her head, softens her tone.
"It's a tremendous amount of work, tremendous. It goes beyond just writing. As the author of a picture book I have to organise all the photography, and do the photography, then do the research and the writing. It's like five different jobs."
Five different jobs that she somehow fell into.
"I actually wanted to do documentaries, and so we decided to start a company to study the business and distribution, to understand the television business first. It was before cable, before satellite, before television really opened up in the world. We did children's programming and animation -- including the work of the late John Hubley -- the chief animator for Walt Disney. His work was very well-known and respected internationally. And then work of some independent filmmakers."
"But several years later, I decided I was more creative than that. I'm not a sales person -- I'm a producer rather than a seller. And then I somehow fell into the books."
It was a new-found passion.
"What's nice about the books, but perhaps it's a bit of an antiquated formula now, is that instead of watching a movie or documentary you have photographs," she explains, readjusting herself again in her chair and taking a long breath. "The type of photographs are very clean, very classical. I felt I wanted to leave the drama to the text, because one compliments the other. For our eyes today the photographs are too clean -- we're used to seeing a million things on a page, look at magazine and newspaper layouts and how they've changed. They force our eyes to go in every which way. I'm still back in the classical way of one simple thing, one shot. Then using the text to make it all come alive. The idea is to allow the character to fill the space. It's not like we're looking at the Romanesque in Europe, it's all revival. But its been revival for about 1000 years. But then you put in the characters and you start to think differently. You can see them, hear them, feel them in the space. You start to understand why they built a place, how they are living in the space, and you begin to look at the space in a different way. I think an exciting way. It brings it to life in a different way. My aim is also to write a text that carries the photos -- a text that can survive on its own."
She takes a lengthy pause.
Her literary style combines the narrative techniques of fiction with factual material in a vignette of life and society within the walls of each villa. Each life led her to another, and each story to the next. Until she ended up in Egypt.
"One thing led to another. Everything led me to the Mediterranean world. Even when I was writing on Palm Beach, I was already thinking about courtyards in Aleppo. Everything led East. Everyone asks why I came East. I tell them my people led me here. My books led me here -- I didn't come here, they carried me here."
Her interlude between the Riviera and Egypt was a book on Malta.
"My people were always on the boats; going to Malta, coming to Alexandria, going to Istanbul, going to India. It's just the way everyone was moving."
Once in Cairo the momentum continued, with much work but a seeming natural progression.
"I spoke to people in Paris before I arrived. They were vague, telling me I would find houses that looked like this," she says, drawing a grand structure in the air. "And yes, when I went to Alexandria I found houses similar to those in the Riviera book. That's what's really interesting. You can find those houses in American Mississippi, on the Riviera, in Spain. And to really understand the area and houses and what was happening in the region, I had to read around the period in many different languages to really get an understanding of what was there. But the works are not complete, so I had to go out and discover for myself what was there -- out of the city and in the smaller provinces."
Her book is to include 40 villas from Alexandria to Assiut, and in between.
"I can't just do Cairo and Alexandria, because then I'd be missing out a lot of Egyptian architecture. It's like doing Ancient Egypt but without the Sphinx and Pyramids. I had done the research, so I knew who was building what, who the modern Egyptian architects were; Hassan Fathy, Ali Labib Gabr, Youssef Kamel Pasha -- the giants of the 20th century. Here we're dealing with a period that was very eclectic, and a place that is very eclectic, so there were a lot of influences coming in from East and West. I tried to even it out and reflect what the period was," she explains of her final 40 choices. "Why is this house sitting in Egypt, that looks like an Italian villa, different from one sitting in the Riviera, or on the Mississippi delta? What makes it different? That's what I was looking for and I think I found -- a very interesting discovery. The entire process itself was a discovery. I find big empty spots in the text at times, and I feel like I'm in no-mans-land. Then I may be looking in one place for something, and reading in German for something else and I find something I've been looking for about the Greeks for the last two years. It's like a big puzzle."
The pieces of which Johnston is reluctant to describe.
"In all my houses, in all styles, you walk in and you see it; every house has its Islamic or oriental-style room. The interesting thing is that I was talking to a Japanese diplomat, and he said they have the same thing in Japan. Today everyone is building the same, so from the outside nothing looks different, but he said that inside you still have the one traditional Japanese style room."
The room is as much as she will share.
"I see or feel something and I want to open people's eyes. Maybe it's directly in front of them, but they don't see it. I want people to see what they couldn't see before. You look at architecture around the world, and you see that around the world it changed. And you wonder why. Why is an Italian villa in some Upper Egyptian province?"
Her search is not quite over.
"I have a few things left. I'm looking for a neo-Islamic house from the same period -- what is still left, preserved and available to photograph. Not so easy."
"Like I said, lots of people start, not many finish. But who said Shakespeare had an easy time, or Proust had an easy time? It wasn't a piece of cake. But they persisted, and they didn't worry about their names appearing on their books, or how much they were making, or who they were socialising with. They just wrote."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 28 August - 3 September 2003 (Issue No. 653)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/653/profile.htm