SINCE ITS INTRODUCTION by British and American artists in the 1800s on through to its mastery by Armenians at the turn of the last century and transfer to the Egyptian greats of the pre-revolutionary period, photography has a long history in Egypt. Photography remains the basis of journalism, advertising and personal expression, even if its acceptance as a true form of art lags behind.

As Colin Osman writes in the 1924 Lehnert and Landrock’s book Picturesque North Africa, “The history of photography is made up of the lives of countless photographers, who are virtually without history. It is a darkness illuminated by beams of light.”

Today, as the profession shifts from negative and slide film to digital, we look at some of the leading visual artists of our time, from hard-bitten news photographers to up-and-coming artists. El-Ustaz

At the old Akhbar El-Yom building, several walls swathed entirely in vivid pictures detailing Egypt’s history welcome visitors to the photography department. Guarding the entrance is a small panel, a kind of shrine, the centerpiece of which is a portrait of chief photographer Mohamed Youssef, surrounded by smaller pictures of every single photographer who has followed him at the national newspaper empire.

“He was the dean of photographers,” says Farouk Ibrahim, manager of the photography department at Akhbar El-Yom, pointing out that Youssef was the first to break through colonial barriers, the first Egyptian to be trusted with managing a photography department’s coverage of the nation at a daily national press outlet.

From today’s vantage point, Youssef’s career seems almost effortless, preordained. Born in Cairo in 1916, he learned photography through reproduction work at the age of 14. In 1936, when the weekly Rose Al-Youssef founded a daily paper, Youssef was hired as a photographer. At 20, he moved to Dar Al-Hilal publishing house to work on its burgeoning empire of periodicals, including Al-Mussawar, Al-Itnein, Dunya and Al-Kawakeb. As the Second World War drew to a close, he joined Akhbar El-Yom, becoming the first Egyptian chief of a press photography department. Here, he was the first Egyptian not just to train Egyptian photographers, but to organize the photographic coverage of his own nation. In 1948, Life magazine published his photos of the Hajj and in 1961, Youssef moved from Akhbar El-Yom to Al-Ahram, following the great Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, who became the editor-in-chief.

Courtesy Antoune Albert Albert photographing President Hosni Mubarak

From the late 1800s, when Americans and Britons first introduced photography in Egypt, until the 1920s, Armenians held a virtual monopoly over the field. Following in the footsteps of G. Lakegian, who arrived from Istanbul in the 1880s, they owned the first commercial photography studios and were pioneers in local photojournalism.

“With an Oriental sensibility but free of any religious prohibition on representational imagery, the Armenians were probably best placed to introduce and develop this latest and bizarre manifestation of Western technology in Egypt,” writes Pierre Gazio in his 1997 book Van Leo: Portraits of Glamour, dedicated to one of the best-known Armenian studio photographers in Cairo.

Ibrahim himself learned photography from Armenians including El-Masr’s Zakhali, but by then Egyptians had mastered the art. “They were all just taking pictures after all,” says Antoune Albert, Egypt’s oldest living photographer. Al-Ahram’s Sherif Sonbol agrees. “Armenians were simply closer to the foreigners who first introduced photography, but they became Egyptian.”

Sonbol first met Youssef about 25 years ago and greatly admires how he always shot people in action. Photographers then used Rolleiflex cameras; armed with two lenses, Rollis meant that what the photographer saw looking from above was not the image shot from the lens below. Yet, “With the very primitive tools available at the time, he could achieve things nobody else could do,” Sonbol marvels of Youssef. When he was over 60 and formally retired, Youssef still had an office at Al-Ahram, where photographers visited him to complain about their superiors or ask for technical assistance. “He told me all the problems I would face and the answers and the whole thing in detail. He told you his secrets, he had no problem,” says Sonbol, adding that everybody called Youssef El-Ustaz [The Master].

Youssef’s official title was Kabir El-Musaurin (chief of photographers), a title no one after him has been granted. But despite the respect he commanded, his views and the underlying political messages behind his photos often landed him in trouble.

Antoune Albert Nubian profiles by Albert, who is preparing a book on Nubia.

“One example was the photo he took in 1948 of the mutilated body of King Farouk’s favorite, Camelia,” wrote Gilbert Beaugé in Egypt: Dream and Realities, published by the Institut de Researches et d’Etudes sur le monde arabe et musulman. (Camelia, Farouk’s mistress, was a rising actress who died tragically young in a plane crash.) “Another was that of the King’s meeting with the representative of the Coptic church, implying that the days of religious taboo were over,” Beaugé continues.

Antoune Albert takes pride in being the oldest photographer in Egypt. “Date of birth: 16 May 1930,” reads his CV, which he hands me as I sit in his office at the state-owned giant Al-Ahram, the very same office Youssef occupied after he retired. So many famous and not-so-famous people and places share his workspace, from Om Kolthoum to a collage of 85 small pictures of Sadat squashed on Al-Ahram’s front page (Albert claims he was the first to use photographic collage in Egyptian newspapers). In another panel, a close-up of little birds on a tea set gives way to Albert’s little daughter holding her toothbrush.

My gaze dropped down again to his CV: “Career missions: participated in the coverage of local and international events, among which the most important ones were: Palestinian revolution (1969), Yemen and Syria Revolutions (1965), Division of Cyprus (1971), Egyptian-Israeli wars.”

The list seemed endless.

Courtesy Farouk Ibrahim

Albert, currently Al-Ahram’s art and photography consultant, always knew he was destined to become a photographer, having grown up surrounded by cameras. His father, an employee at the Suez Tribunal, opened a studio in the 1920s to supplement his income before relocating the family to Damanhour. In 1952, Albert started to work as both a journalist and photographer for the paper, eventually becoming its Damanhour bureau chief and finally moving to Cairo. In 1985, he was promoted to chief photographer. He has held his current post since 1993; during his stint as chief photographer he also served as President Hosni Mubarak’s official photographer from 1989 to 1991.

Despite the litany of achievements, I soon realize that Albert does not really want to talk, but just show me his pictures. “I prefer to give you the photo and you can read it,” he announces. And for the next hour that’s exactly what I do, leafing through hundreds of photos Albert keeps extracting from endless envelopes and pouring out on his desk.

“You know, I have a lot. Not less than 5,000.” It’s a modest estimate.

I reach for a photo of President Gamal Abdel Nasser surrounded by a cheering crowd. “People loved him. I loved him too, very much,” Albert says. There are also pictures of Mubarak, the Mohamed Ali Mosque at night, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the streets of Alexandria. A photo of Palestinian freedom fighters crossing a pond catches my eye, and looking closely I can clearly make out the bullets cutting through the water next to their legs.

“It was very dangerous,” Albert tells me. He recounts how he was captured in Rafah while covering the war and kept hostage with other reporters in a small cottage for several days. But he talks of the traumatic events in the same neutral tone he uses to describe his architecture photos or his pictures of the Sixth of October Bridge.

Farouk Ibrahim President Sadat at El-Montaza hotel in Alexandria one year before his death

In the 1950s and 1960s, Albert became famous for refusing to use flash. He also made sure photographers working for him knew how to use natural light rather than flash, which he believes “deletes everything.” Sonbol, his one-time pupil, remembers very well one of his first assignments over 20 years ago, when Albert was chief photographer.

“Antoune Albert. I owe him a lot. He sent me to a moulid to take pictures. When I came back he said, ‘These are the worst pictures I’ve ever seen. How dare you work with a flash!’

‘But there was no light,’ I replied.

‘You ruined the picture,’ he said. ‘Out of here.’

And that’s how I learned to take pictures in the dark,” recalls Sonbol.

Farouk Ibrahim Om Kolthoum with Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba in 1968 .

Albert still takes his own pictures and has grudgingly started using digital cameras, “but only for personal and quick shots,” he promptly assures me. “If I need to take a beautiful picture, I won’t do it in digital.“ He thinks digital has irremediably changed the way photographers work, and not for the better. “It’s not the feeling of the photographer. The feeling I love is lost.”

Who have you talked to from my generation?” Farouk Ibrahim, the photographic manager of Akhbar El-Yom, asks me as soon as I sit down.

“Antoune Albert”

Ibrahim’s face opens up. “Yes, I’m from the Antoune Albert generation.”

Courtesy Amr Nabil

Ibrahim has been a photographer for 55 years, though he claims he is only 40. True Om Kolthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Anwar Sadat are the people who made him famous, he says as he hands me their pictures, but he himself has always been the real star, he announces, always in the right place at the right time and with a natural instinct for survival.

Barely stopping for breath, Ibrahim admits he never liked school. His uncle worked at the newspaper El-Masri and once Ibrahim happened to see photos of some movie stars on a desk. It was then that he decided he wanted to be a photographer so he could meet the stars, too. His first task as a photographer was to clean the floors of the darkroom. Eventually, Ibrahim obtained the privilege of carrying the bags and holding the magnesium flash for the newspaper’s famous photographers. He was 12 years old.

One of Ibrahim’s first assignments as a flash-holder was the wedding of the daughter of Fouad Serragedin, then head of Al-Wafd Party and Minister of Interior, on a boat belonging to the wife of Al-Nahas Pasha, the prime minister. Two million policemen filled the street, he recalls. Standing on a chair, Ibrahim, fired the flash as he was told to do, but the wooden ceiling of the boat caught fire and Ibrahim fled for cover.

Despite the rocky start, it was only three years later that Ibrahim was taking his own pictures for the newspaper. He had a Rolleicord camera with 12-shot film and carried around a flash that weighed 12 kg — “we used to replace it with a motorcycle battery when it broke” — and which hurt his ankle as he walked because the belt couldn’t be shortened. Ibrahim never learned how to elbow his way through to the picture, but he was always small enough to sneak under others and to make his shot.

(Photographers, whether photojournalists, commercial photographers or artists, hate the common notion that they ‘take’ photographs, insisting instead that a good photo is ‘made.’)

Amr Nabil The Hajj photographed by Amr Nabil

Despite his aversion to school, Ibrahim soon realized it was also important to get an education, at least to boost his chances of finding a wife. So, after work he would go to night school, and after he got his diploma, he pursued a degree at the faculty of applied arts. Among the 43 students, he was the only professional photographer. In their sophomore year, each student had to hand in three pictures, and Ibrahim did the homework for the whole class, charging his colleagues LE 1 each. But when he clumsily gave the same picture to two students, his professors asked for the negatives.

The students confessed and Ibrahim was promptly kicked out.

When Mubarak was still vice-president, Akhbar El-Yom editor-in-chief Mousa Sabri sent Ibrahim to China, where he took Mubarak’s pictures, later splashed across the front pages of Egyptian newspapers. Mubarak soon became president, and Ibrahim served as one of his official photographers until 1990. For a time, only he and photographers from news agencies were allowed in the Presidential Palace (the president himself decided this after one photographer snapped a shot of him talking agitatedly to Abou Ghazala, the former defense minister). Jealous, other photographers complained to the Press Syndicate about Ibrahim’s monopoly over presidential pictures and circulated rumors about him allegedly paying bribes to keep the monopoly and sell the pictures to the highest bidder.

He says he does not mind. “Actually, I was very happy because my name was in the newspapers all the time. Now, there are seven official photographers instead of me alone, but the Presidential Palace takes all the money and still the other photographers are not allowed in,” he says. “This proves I was not the reason.”

Ibrahim eventually left the Presidential Palace because the work as official photographer became “very bureaucratic and very boring for an artist,” he says. “They hired a press director who was a military journalist, Mohamed Abdel Monem, who knew nothing about pictures.”

Courtesy Sherif Sonbol

Ibrahim now teaches photography at Akhbar El-Yom Academy, which trains the next generation of the media empire’s journalists, and at the private Sixth of October University. He likes the feeling of teaching, both because God pays you back if you share what you know and because 360 students call him Doctor though he does not have a university degree.

It is always 10 minutes to 10 in Amr Nabil’s office. The second hand stubbornly tries to go past 12, but hopelessly beats again and again against the 50th minute. Nabil, chief photographer at Associated Press in Cairo, sits in front of his computer in his khakis as if about to be called to shoot a war. It’s hardly an exaggeration: In his storied career, he has covered political and conflict stories ripped from the headlines of the past two decades, though he modestly downplays the details.

“I can remember the first time I held a camera. It was a gift from my father. I was almost 9,” he says. As we speak, an AP reporter dashes into Nabil’s office to say a man in Saudi had just been killed. “I can remember the first photo I took,” continues Nabil, his fingers dialing a number in Saudi Arabia to verify the information. “It was at the zoo, the animals and elephants, cleaning themselves”

Nabil is only 38, but he has accumulated experience working in several newspapers.

Sherif Sonbol children help out in the sugar cane squeeze to make molasses (from his book The 40 Pyramids of Egypt and their Neighbors)

“The angle, the lighting, the action. AP, through their production [over the years], taught me how to think about photography.” As did Farouk Ibrahim. “My hobby from the age of 15 to 27 was to see his pictures and sometimes watch him take his portraits and look at the place where he was standing, so that the next morning when I saw the newspaper I could say, ‘That is the picture he took while lying down on the floor’”

Today, Nabil uses a digital camera for his assignments, but he learned the old way first.

“I’m lucky to have started in black-and-white photography [before moving] to the digital high-quality image. Any photographer should pass through the right doors, but we spent a lot of time to improve our skills as good photographers. A lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money. For the young photographers, life is much easier, but there’s something missing in their profession. It’s like cooking. If it takes a long time at a low temperature, the taste is much better than if food is cooked at a very high temperature in a very short time.”

But Nabil is the first to admit technological developments in the field have made his job much easier. For one, a digital camera produces photos immediately.

“You have the chance to decide if what you have is good or not. You can correct the exposure, if it’s too high or low. At the beginning, we didn’t have such luck. We went to the location, and if you made a mistake [and messed up the assignment] you would be fired. With technology, it is much easier. It’s a kind of magic. In the big cities like Cairo, if you have a digital camera and a Vodafone card, you can send the pictures to London. It takes 10 minutes to choose your pictures, write the captions and send them to your regional bureau.

Sherif Sonbol a performance choreographed by Walid Aouni.

“When I started this career, that operation took two hours. You needed an hour to develop the negative film. Remember, the Internet wasn’t available in Egypt until 1999. We used drum cylinders from 1990 to 1995 and the Leefax transmission system from ‘95 to ‘98, which separated the colors in three and each went to London alone. Sending each color took half an hour. In 1998, we bought a Macintosh [today, Macintoshes and Adobe PhotoShop software are essential tools for press photographers]. We’re still keeping that [original Mac], as a record. It was a revolution. It had scanner and laptop in one set; you could scan the negative and send using an international line, because there was no internet.”

Nabil chose to study fine arts at university, but after joining the faculty it became clear to him that photography was what he’d be doing the rest of his life. He recounts how he used to go to Old Cairo to paint but ended up taking photos of the landscape and the people. At university, he displayed an uncanny ability to photograph colorful paintings and maintain the same colors in the photo.

“Technically it’s hard. Now we can scan it. There was no way to scan to get real colors then.”

Nabil’s career as a photojournalist took off in 1987 when a neighbor who worked as a journalist at the newly founded daily Al-Wafd asked him to go with her for a story about the restoration of Mohamed Ali Mosque. The chief photographer, Abdel Wahab Al-Saheti, was impressed and asked him to join the team after graduation. Nabil accepted and worked there full time from 1978 to 1990. That year, the seasoned photographer started working from Cairo for the Saudi newspaper Okaz. He remembers well his first Arab summit, in Cairo, eight days after Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

“I was the youngest photographer there and there were people like Antoune Albert from Al-Ahram. I felt I was dreaming,” he smiles.

Courtesy Randa Shaath

After covering many more summits for Okaz and the terrorist attacks that plagued Egypt in those years, he was eventually hired by Agence France-Presse (AFP) in 1996 and then AP in 1999 and learned to work in the fast-paced business of news agencies.

“Elements like lighting, composition, angle, expression” are still very important, but what is fundamental is that the photographer brings his understanding of the story. “How to summarize the situation and capture a picture that can match the story. That’s my challenge. For the news agency, if at the end of the assignment I’m sending too many pictures of one story, that means I was doing very bad. If I send three pictures, it means I had the right picture. You have to summarize the situation as much as you can, but showing all the details.”

Nabil’s grace under pressure is legendary. In even the most high-tension situations, he produces news images that can only be called art. Editors at this magazine are only partially joking when they say they can look at Middle East photos tumbling down the AP photo wire — elections in Egypt, conflict in Palestine, war in Iraq, an Ahli-Zamalek match or a snap of Eid Al-Adha —and pick out “an Amr Nabil photo.” That came to an end late last December, when Nabil was covering the Parliamentary elections in Zagazig: during a clash between supporters of the government and the Muslim Brotherhood, a brick or a stone hit his face and broke his glasses, damaging his eyes, says AP News Editor Lee Keath. Nabil is currently in Germany where he had two surgeries. “He’s doing better. We’re expecting him to get his vision back and come back to work with us. We hope,” says Keath.

Twenty-five or so years ago, Sherif Sonbol went into the insurance business. “I left. I couldn’t sit at a desk. I couldn’t stand it,” he says, fidgeting as he adds that he spent much of the time outside in the streets anyway, buying groceries at the Garden City stores.

One day, he walked into Al-Ahram and asked for work as a photographer. Eventually, Antoune Albert agreed, but there were 15 photographers at the newspaper and all the beats were taken.

“They told me, ‘You have no place here. Someone is in charge of sports photography. Someone of politics, someone else of accidents and crime,’” Sonbol says.

So he invented his own beat: Ballet.

“At the time, ballet was a very minor issue. There was no Opera House, but I have loved ballet since I was a child. I went to the Ballet Academy. They were fully cooperative. They gave me two dancers to take pictures of. The chairman [of the Academy] was Abdel-Moneim Kamel [currently chief of the Cairo Opera House]. There was no stage to dance or perform on, but he received me and realized he might have found a photographer.”

It was Kamel’s prima ballerina wife Erminia who taught Sonbol how to take pictures of the dancers.

Self-portrait by Nabil Boutros

“Artists are not people who can talk about their art. Critics should. Nureyev, the Russian dancer who lived in New York, said ‘If I had known it I wouldn’t have danced it.’ This is also true of photography and art in general. You have to know what to expect you have to move with the dancers — and shooting a moving subject beautifully is a very difficult thing. If you’re shooting a McDonald’s sandwich, you have full control. You have the lettuce, and if it’s not fresh you can change it. I’m not saying it’s easy, but you have full control. In ballet photography, you have to be full of eyes, because you have no control over anything that happens and you have to shoot it, capture it. The other thing is that dancers themselves sometimes are not in the right mood. [When] jumping together they have to be the same, otherwise the company is bad. And sometimes the maestro makes mistakes. After years, you move with the music and you push your shutter release with the music. If you wait till you see it, then you’ve lost it. It’s a group work of a very complicated nature,” the artist explains.

Sonbol has been the official photographer of the Opera House for over 15 years and has put on some 13 exhibitions in Cairo and abroad, most notably the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. “Rare is the photographer who looks at a familiar art form and shows it in a new light,” wrote journalist Anna Kisselgoff in a New York Times review of his ballet photos.

But ballet is not his only subject of interest. Sonbol, who is Al-Ahram Weekly’s chief photographer, has just published the book, The 40 Pyramids of Egypt and Their Neighbors. In 1999, AUC Press released Mulid! Carnivals of Faith! and he contributed to several collections of works by various artists.

Although he tried to study photography, Sonbol has not been allowed to do so in Egypt. “I went to the faculty of applied arts and they asked, ‘What’s your background?’

‘I studied insurance.’

Youssef Nabil Youssef Nabil’s Rania, Cairo, 2002

‘Sorry, we cannot accept you. You have to have an arts diploma.’

“When I had my first exhibit at the Opera House two years later, a man in a smart suit walked in and asked ‘Where is the artist?’ He was not convinced I could be the artist. I did not have a suit — I don’t have a suit.

‘Very nice work. I’ve never seen such work in Egypt. I’m Dr. Amir, head of the photography department at the faculty of applied arts. Would you like to give classes?’

I said, ‘I’m happy with what I’m doing, but can I take classes?’

‘What have you studied?’

Maha Maamoun Maha Maamoun’s Beach

‘Insurance.’

‘Sorry, but you can’t.’

But photography classes are the least of Sonbol’s worries. He’s more concerned that photographers are often not treated as professionals in Egypt. “Long ago I’d be so happy that they published my pictures, small as a stamp, in Al-Ahram. They’d never run my credit but told me, ‘It’s an honor to be in Al-Ahram. I’d call up all my friends and tell them, ‘Hey there’s a picture of mine in Al-Ahram.’

“The other problem here is there is nothing called copyright. Anybody in any magazine can cut out the photo, reproduce your picture and not only do they not give you credit or pay you; sometimes they even credit someone else. It’s a joke. So you lose interest,” he says, warming to his complaints.

“And then another thing that annoys me,” he continues, “I’ve seen it so many times. I apply for a job and I ask for LE 500 pounds. ‘No, it’s too much,’ I’m told. And then, they give it to an American photographer for LE 10,000. Why is that? Or you see an Egyptian who breezes in and says, ‘I learned photography in America’ and they’re happy to hire him just because he studied somewhere else.”

Barry Iverson Wrapped Lion by Barry Iverson

Art does not illustrate the story,” believes Randa Shaath. “It tells another story, and in combination can give an even larger story.” Born to an Egyptian mother and Palestinian father, Shaath spent most of her life in Egypt. She majored in Middle East studies at the American University in Cairo and then obtained an MA in visual communication at the University of Minnesota.

She didn’t have a background in photography, but what she did have was an enormous passion, and after working as a stringer for AFP in Egypt and Gaza, she became a staff photographer at Al-Ahram Weekly in 1993.

Before that, in 1988, the Cairo-based publishing house Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi had published her photos of daily life in Canada Camp, a now-destroyed Palestinian camp on the border between Egypt and Palestine, in the children’s book Watani ala Marma Hagar (My Homeland is but a Stone’s Throw Away). More Palestine photos appear in the book Borders and Beyond, published by Pro Helvetia in 2000.

Shaath has always photographed in black and white, and though she has put on exhibitions abroad, in the US and Spain as well as in Cairo, she says she never thought of her work as art. “I don’t mind [sending my work to galleries],” she says, “but it has not changed my way of working.”

And Shaath’s way of working is indeed unique. To express her values and beliefs through her photos and make a statement, Shaath must first spend time in the places and with the people she photographs so she can tackle what she feels she can understand. Over the past decade, she shot a series about Cairo’s rooftops. It took her a whole year to document the life of the people living there. But it took her even longer, two years, to finish a project on the islands of Cairo. Both series of photographs have been published in Under the Same Sky, together with portraits of a variety of locals, including painters, writers, filmmakers and parking lot attendants.

Her most recent work, still unfinished, deals with Cairo’s sidewalks. “I always saw the beauty in people, the humanity. But lately, people here have become more aggressive and I was not visually showing what I feel.” She is not unhappy with the shots she has taken so far, but needs time to figure out a way of visualizing her negative feelings. “Maybe when I come back,” she says.

Shaath, who is no longer working with Al-Ahram Weekly, is currently in Algeria, where she has relocated with her photographer husband Thomas Hartwell, there on a Fulbright photography scholarship. She has already started taking pictures of Algeria — in color, no less, though she warns it’s only an experiment.

But Shaath’s main concern upon her return is that there are too few outlets for photojournalists in Egypt. At Al-Ahram Weekly, two pages were dedicated entirely to photography. “It was the only place that really respected my pictures. It gave me the space, time and license to come up with my own ideas.”

As a student of fine arts in France, Nabil Boutros’ interest in photography had always been minor. “I was taking pictures of places and locations that have some soul in a kind of way, but it wasn’t art.”

After all, it was the 1970s, and few people in Egypt considered photography an art. “In the 1970s photography was used officially — to show politicians shaking hands — in the newspapers, but very few people did it for themselves, through studios, for weddings and so on. It was very functional. The Armenians and some Egyptians had studios and their customers were the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie left in the 1950s and 1960s, and the new coming bourgeoisie did not have this Occidental taste or any kind of appreciation of this kind of studio. So many of them closed down,” Boutros recalls.

After graduating from France’s College des beaux arts in 1980, Boutros worked as a secretary, an archivist and made copies of paintings for the Louvre in order to pay the bills. In 1990, he returned to Cairo and spent three months on the streets taking portraits of people, using the same frame and focal-length lenses for everyone. He did not simply snap the pictures quickly or surreptitiously, but talked to people and made it very clear that he was shooting them.

The work was shown at the Guggenheim in New York as part of an exhibition about African photography.

For Boutros, photography expresses the research of a realism that is not lifelike, of an image that is universal and potentially completed by each viewer’s imagination. This entails great discipline in using the camera. Since the Guggenheim project, he has come to Egypt once or twice a year but says he has grown tired of just doing documentary photography per se. Instead, he started gathering black and white and color prints in compositions, as he does with the series Copts of Egypt.

“I have enough with one picture that says everything If you’re putting them together you’re leaving it open to the imagination like the Russian matrioshkas, but not so systematically. Sometimes the third picture is calling something from the first.”

Boutros has also worked on stage design with theater troupes in Egypt, including El-Gomhurriya on the play Scenography of Light. To him, stage design is another way of creating pictures. “In a black box, you create places through the light.”

The new school

Like many Egyptians before him, young photographer Youssef Nabil owes his career to an Armenian. Nabil, who was 20 at the time, met Van Leo after failing to enter the Cinema Institute. The notorious photographer, who had been running a studio in Cairo with his brother Angelo since 1940, made a name for himself taking Hollywood-like portraits of starlets, intellectuals and soldiers, then of pashas, later of the Free Officers. A master of chiaroscuro photography, Van Leo was able to recreate through his shots “the ideal beauty as presented by the film magazines and glamour shots he collected as a child,” as Gazio writes, making them look like Hollywood stars.

But in the 1990s, demand for Van Leo’s portraits had diminished, and he was seriously thinking of closing down his studio.

Until he met Nabil. The young man was the perfect apprentice and quickly mastered Van Leo’s technique, which he still uses to this day. Hand-coloring black and white photos gives Nabil’s pictures a feeling of old melodrama combined with modern mosalsalat (not surprising given the subjects he photographs — Youssra, Fifi Abdo and other Egyptian stars). He uses watercolors and pencils, and it can take three to 10 days to color a photo. But Nabil’s talent quickly won him attention abroad, and he moved to Paris and then New York, where he grew and fully obtained recognition as an artist.

“I left Cairo to work with David Lachapelle in New York, then Mario Testino in Paris,” he says. “When I got back to Cairo in 1999, I had my first solo show with the late Renate Jordane, owner of the Cairo Berlin Gallery. I was then introduced to many Egyptian artists.”

But if you’re a photographer and want to sell your work, Egypt is not the place to be, warns gallery owner Karim Francis. The public, he explains, does not yet appreciate the value of photography as artwork. Customers “don’t trust the photo as an original” and don’t understand the concept of printing only a limited number of copies, he adds.

Last year, Francis tried to dedicate a space — one of his galleries on El-Sherifein Street, Downtown — to photography, but it did not work.

“I didn’t feel any interest in the public or the buyers,” he explains. People, after all, have yet to discover painting here. “Even with Nabil Boutros, whose photos are sold for LE 12,000, you show them here in Cairo and people put their fingers on them,” he says. He shows me a photo by Lara Baladi — a pair of red feet against the moon, which cost LE 7,000, then an Adel El-Siwi which cost LE 6,000. Baladi’s friends will buy her picture, he says, because they know her. But most people, when comparing prices of a photograph and a painting will buy the painting — or ask for a very cheap photo.

Even in commercial photography, “The problem is that the clients want something very good and very cheap; and 90 percent of the time, they buy the mediocre and cheap,” says Mohamed Gabr, 44, owner of MG Studio, one of the biggest studios specializing in advertising photography in Egypt. “Most of them have no concept of what a visual is, what a conceptual shoot is. No artistic background. They’re dealing with it as a commodity, as a product. They come in saying, ‘I want this picture,’ and it’s often a cutout from a foreign magazine.”

Even gallery owners are sometimes unconvinced that certain types of photography are an art.

“I like conceptual art, but I like fine art more,” says Hamdy Reda, a 33-year-old Helwan University graduate of fine arts. “I try to tell young photographers that not everything is conceptual. [But] Townhouse and Mashrabia are more interested in conceptual art. So the young artists follow this way of conceptual, contemporary art.” Although Reda managed to put on a solo exhibition in Dahab and took part in a group exhibition at Atelier Cairo, he has to work as a graphic designer and freelance photographer for publications and foundations for a living. “I’ve never earned anything from art,” he says.

Sherif Karas also has to work outside the field to make a living. The 23-year-old sales employee at EgyptAir recently held a solo exhibition at the Culture Wheel tackling what he describes as “Egyptian faces and places that are still holding their genuine look and features without being affected by nowadays changes of modernity and globalization.” Despite his appreciation of established techniques, Karas cannot help leaving the past behind when continuity does not appear to be convenient. “Digital is very easy, very quick, what you see is what you get. If the target is a nice photo, why should I indulge in a complicated camera system? I need to catch a photo at once.”

But breaking the link between old and new could signal disaster for Egypt’s photography buffs, which is precisely why Mohamed Yousri decided to create the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), an artist-run project, which opened its own space last month on Safeya Zaghloul Street in Mounira. The group welcomes artists in their 20s or their 50s, operating on the principle that the latter’s knowledge of Egyptian photography and career experience are precious for the new generation of photographers, photojournalists, commercial and visual artists.

Barry Iverson is one of the seasoned photographers participating in the project. He has lived in Cairo since 1979 and for 25 years has covered the Middle East for Time magazine (the assassination of Sadat, the invasion of Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf War, among other events). Iverson also has a passion for the history of photography. He was a friend of Van Leo and helped transfer his 22,000-30,000 prints and negatives plus personal effects to AUC after his death.

Iverson himself takes his own pictures in black and white and has them hand-colored by an Egyptian artist, following Van Leo’s technique. He also has a collection of about 40,000 prints — mainly anonymous nineteenth century Egyptian portraits, landscapes, antiquity sites and twentieth century Egyptian portraits and vernacular work — which he gathered in Tunisia, Iran, Syria, the US and Europe.

Maha Maamoun, a self-defined artist and member of the Collective, explains that there has been a recent boost in the production and possibility of exhibiting photographic work in Cairo.

“There is interesting work that is being proposed that is not just photography but contemporary art a huge change in terms of how people work, spaces and opportunities . But this could be very seasonal.”  et