Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil was born on the 6th of November 1972. He is an Egyptian artist and photographer. Youssef Nabil began his photography career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his subjects acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later in the 1990s, while working as a photographers' assistant in studios in New York and Paris, he began photographing artists and friends, producing both formal portraits as well as placing his subjects in the realms of dreams and sleep, on the edge of awareness, far from their daylight selves.
On his return to Egypt in 1999 he further developed his hand-painted photography, with portraits of writers, singers and film stars of the Arab world. Since returning to Paris and New York in 2003, he started producing self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt. This series that has evolved over the years is characterised by liminal scenes in which he lingers between worldly realities and serene dreams, loneliness and fears of death.
Nabil's distinctive technique of hand-coloring silver gelatin prints removes the blemishes of reality. Nabil disrupts prevalent notions of color photography and painting, as well as assumptions about the aesthetic sensibilities associated with art and those identified with popular culture. His hand-colouring evokes a sense of longing and nostalgia and allows his photographs to flicker between our time and another era.
Nabil shoots intricately arranged black-and-white photographs, primarily portraits, which he then meticulously hand-colors in a rich and varied palette, employing a technique based on the color-tinting of old Egyptian portrait studios. “The technique I got from Egypt, but the colors I got from personal experience,” he has said.
Background.
Born in Cairo, Egypt, Nabil started his photography career in 1992, shortly before meeting the American photographer David LaChapelle in Cairo, with whom he worked in New York in 1993. In 1997, Nabil worked in Paris with the Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino till late 1998. In 1999, Youssef Nabil had his first solo exhibition in Cairo. Through the years he remained a close friend with the Egyptian-Armenian studio portrait photographer Van Leo (Leon Boyadjian, 1921–2001), who encouraged Nabil to leave to the West. In 2003, Youssef Nabil was awarded the Seydou Keita Prize in the Biennial of African Photography in Bamako.
In 2001, while visiting Cairo, British artist Tracey Emin discovered Nabil's work and later nominated him as a future top artist in Harper's article "Tomorrow People". Nabil left Egypt in 2003 for an artist residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. In 2006, he moved to live and work in New York.
Many have been subject to Nabil's lens and distinctive technique of hand-colouring gelatin silver prints, including artists Tracey Emin, Gilbert and George, Nan Goldin, Marina Abramović, Louise Bourgeois, and Shirin Neshat; singers Alicia Keys, Sting (musician), and Natacha Atlas; actors Robert De Niro, Omar Sharif, Faten Hamama, Rossy de Palma, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, and Catherine Deneuve.
In 2010, Nabil wrote, produced and directed his first film "You Never Left", an 8-minute short film with actors Fanny Ardant and Tahar Rahim. It is set in an allegorical place that is a metaphor of a lost Egypt, sketching an intimate and solemn parallel between exile and death. This video in which he reverently and inventively revisits the characteristics of Egyptian cinema’s golden age, with its movie stars and Technicolor film stock, he reconnects with the source and inspiration of his photographic imagery with which it shares the same personal, diaristic quality.
In 2015, Nabil produced his second video, "I Saved My Belly Dancer", with actors Salma Hayek and Tahar Rahim, a narration around his fascination with the tradition of belly dancers and the disappearance of the art form that is unique to the Middle East. The 12-minute video also explores shifting perceptions of women in the Arab world and the tensions between the amplified sexualisation of their bodies and the continued repression of women in modern Arab society.
Nabil's work has been presented on numerous international solo and group exhibitions, at venues including the British Museum, London; Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, MMK Museum für Modern Kunst, Frankfurt, MASP Museu de Arte de São Paulo, IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, La Maison Rouge, Paris, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, MACBA Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Biennale of the Visual Arts of Santa Cruz, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; The Third Line, Dubai; Galerist, Istanbul; Nathalie Obadia gallery, Paris; Yossi Milo gallery, New York; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; Aperture Foundation, New York, Villa Medici, Rome and Palazzo Grassi, Venice.
Youssef Nabil is part of various international collections including Collection François Pinault, Paris; LACMA Museum, Los Angeles; LVMH The Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Sindika Dokolo Foundation, Luanda, La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; the joint collection of The British Museum and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and PAMM, Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Four monographs have been published on Youssef Nabil's work – "Sleep in My Arms" (Autograph ABP and Michael Stevenson, 2007), "I Won't Let You Die" (Hatje Cantz, 2008), "Youssef Nabil" ( Flammarion, 2013) and "Once Upon A Dream" ( Marsilio, 2020).
Nabil lives and works in Paris and New York City.
Selected exhibitions.
Selected Group exhibitions.
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, U.S.A.
MMK Museum für Modern Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany.