Photographer and filmmaker · Egypt
Youssef Nabil
Youssef Nabil (born 1972) is an Egyptian photographer and filmmaker who hand-colours his black-and-white prints in the manner of the studio portraits and film posters of mid-century Egypt. His portraits of film stars, artists and friends, and his self-portraits, are about memory, exile, desire and a vanishing Egyptian cinema.
Updated 2 min read
Youssef Nabil was born in Cairo in 1972 and grew up watching the black-and-white melodramas of Egyptian cinema's golden age. As a young photographer he assisted the fashion photographers David LaChapelle in New York (1993–94, according to one biography) and Mario Testino (1997–98, in New York and then Paris), before developing his own technique. His first solo show was in Cairo in 1999, and in 2001 the British artist Tracey Emin saw his work there and helped bring it to wider notice.
He photographs in black and white and then colours each print by hand, as the studio retouchers and poster painters of Cairo once did. The result is soft, glowing and slightly unreal, closer to a film still than to a snapshot. He has photographed actors, singers and artists from Egypt and around the world, and made many self-portraits in which he appears, often with his face turned away, in landscapes and rooms far from Egypt.
He has also directed short films. You Never Left (2010), his first, runs about eight minutes with Fanny Ardant and Tahar Rahim and is set in an allegorical place that stands for a lost Egypt; I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015), which one source says stars Salma Hayek and Tahar Rahim, is tied to women's freedom to choose belly dancing. Nabil moved to Paris around 2003 and to New York in 2006, and much of his work is about the distance between the country he left and the one he carries.
How to look at a Nabil: take the colour as the subject. It is laid on by hand over a silver print, so each picture is unique, and it recalls the family portraits and 1970s and 1980s Cairo movie posters from which he draws. Ask what the soft glow removes and what it keeps. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The Nathalie Obadia gallery, Galerist in Istanbul (which showed You Never Left), Hatje Cantz and Ocula document his shows and books, and auction houses sell the You Never Left prints. Ask each what is currently on view. See also our lists of Egyptian photographers and African photographers.
