Helfried Nagel plays on colour and goes straight for the heartstrings, notes Gamal Nkrumah It says much about the enigmatic Helfried Nagel (nail in German) that he chooses a red and blue key ring pendant in Morocco as a photographic subject matter. Then he goes for a green key ring pendant, also Moroccan. His choice of colours is reminiscent of May-flowering trees -- warm, sensuous and heavenly. If the name Nagel means anything to you, then you will understand how this curious figure has shuffled into the maelstrom of contemporary Cairene life. Weighed down by his camera, he moves deftly around Cairo... and around the world. His aspect, both comic and conscientious, suggests a sense of urgency and poignancy. It is as if he is trying to expiate his sins, but in reality he is a keen observer. Nagel hails from Bavaria, and now lives in Stuttgart, when he is not in Cairo, a city he has made his home for the past couple of years. His photographs are provocative in as much as they are contemplative. So why do they arouse such passions? It is because he is a passionate man, I suspect. In the meantime, his reserve shows no sign of melting. He is a bundle of contradictions -- a German raised in Italy and a Libra to boot. Looking around, it is clear why Nagel loves Egypt so. Noon on a bright and airy apartment in Zamalek overlooking the Gezira Sporting Club grounds is a long way away from the rolling hills of Mediterranean Tuscany or the enchanting dense forests of Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg. He has brought an innate understanding of how to appreciate the little things of life. Nagel's east-coexists-with-west approach is apparent in his photographic exhibition at Kunst. He is a fan of multiculturalism. "Travelling is learning life. Colours are the symbols of life. See my colours, but recognise and discover the people behind the symbolic colours and get connected in a virtual way," he deliberates. Nagel's photographs tell his travels' stories in their rich and beautiful colours. It is the everyday lives of people and their interaction with colours that fascinate him. He stops to watch people at work and at play. They, too, stop to watch him and that is when he takes his shots. He says that he has been overwhelmed by the friendliness of the people he encounters. His pyramids resemble great ships about to set sail. His tulips sprout like spring flowers before the searing heat sets in and they wither. His compositions are festooned with people in festive mood. And in every shot, conventions are fast shifting. Over the course of the shiftless afternoon, Nagel is capturing the very essence of bundles of flowers and assorted accessories, bolts of colourful cloth, culminating in "I Like Colours" -- the exhibition runs through 1-15 May at Kunst Gallery Café, Downtown. Pastel shades and light fabrics compete with bold hues and heavy cloth. Nagel's work draws on different cultures and aesthetics. The ubiquitous tulips are occasionally jettisoned for magnolias. "Home is where your memories are," Nagel muses wistfully. The result is an intimate affair with Cairo, with Egypt and a world that seemed most alien to him when he first set his gaze on it. I defy anyone not to marvel at Nagel's depiction of football spectators in heartrendingly ravishing colours. Where is the satire? Where's the colour, the comic insight and razor sharp wit? His first exhibition is "I love colours" and his next is "I love people". He loves both. He worked with handicapped children in Alexandria. But this is not the topic of discussion for the time being. "I love Egypt," he chuckles. But then there is that fleeting, tight-lipped hiss- laugh that could mean anything. Fortuitously, he shows me hundreds of his photos on his laptop. He lives frugally, that much is clear. He serves me South African tea. Hunched over his cluttered desk he is listening to Handel's Concerto Grosso. Bach, though is his favourite classical composer. His mother, a musician, wanted him to be a pianist but he gave up on his 18th birthday, bitterly disappointing his mother, and then decided to follow in his father's footsteps, opting for architecture as a career. He was born in Bavaria, raised in Milan and Rome, married and raised a son who has inherited the family's artistic streak -- he is an arts director. After practising his profession for several decades, Nagel gave that up too, and has since travelled the world in search of colour. I cannot help suspecting that he is, in the best sense of the phrase, "on the run". He is also on the move, I reckon. And so here Helfried Nagel is, on the run, taking photographs of colourful experiences, catching glimpses of cultural decay, speaking philosophically of the light on the crumbling buildings of Cairo. Some people wouldn't want to go anywhere near such anguish and distress, however much solace there may be at the end. "After some days, I saw the life of the so- called 'normal' people and I got to know some of them. I saw how they were struggling to make ends meet, every day, every hour, every minute and every second. It is a hard life, but there is a lot of happiness, too." There is something commendable about Nagel's love for Cairo. His desire to bring a harsh tale to a wider audience in bold colour. His colours are loud, and so are his photographs. They are all sassy loudmouths. "I don't like dark colours and I don't particularly like green," Nagel muses. "I love blue, perhaps it is my favourite colour." I cannot help visualising an apparent incongruity -- perhaps one of his eyes is green and the other blue. You could argue, of course, that this pretty much encapsulates what colour means to most of us. Memories are made of colour and humble materials trigger an intense emotional response when they are swathed in brilliant colour. All this came flooding back to me as I wandered among the beautiful photographs captured by Nagel from countries as far afield as South Africa and Japan, India, Morocco, Turkey and his native Germany. So far, so clichéd. The chief officer architect of the German Bundes Post in Freiburg, promoted to chief officer architect of the German Federal Government in Bonn and then Berlin seems remarkably sanguine about the prospect of living in Cairo. Nagel's change of heart raises many questions about artistic and photographic principles and compromise. He has never studied photography formally. He is, he humbly admits, an amateur photographer. Yet he speaks like a seasoned expert. "Stuttgart is a partner city of Cairo," he tells me. What does that mean? Unanswerable question, I reflect a little too late. "There are beautiful gardens and parks in Stuttgart. Cairo is not a very green city," he chuckles quietly. "I suppose that is another reason why Cairo appeals to me." What is striking about this Bavarian bureaucrat turned artist is his warm presence. He is anything but imposing. Yet in his travels around the world he was perceptive and sensitive enough to zoom in on a curtain knot in Morocco, a stack of flip flops in Southern Africa and red hot peppers in Alexandria. In those halcyon days, colour was a novelty for Nagel. "Harmonic, cheerful and bright contrasts communicated and reflected my newfound fascination with the colour. The painters Willibrord Haas, August Macke and Piet Mondrian influenced me most. Finally, I chose the camera to be my medium." Colour comes in many guises. And stark, dun-hued Egypt has been on his mind for some time now. "I always felt very cosmopolitan. I always felt a citizen of the world," he muses. One of his idols is the late Hassan Fathi. "I first heard about him in 1967. I was fascinated by the fashion in which he taught poor people about their rights. He created architecture and shelter for the poor that were not devoid of their social context and ecological surroundings. He constructed houses that were safe, clean and comfortable and most importantly, inexpensive. He uses local material." He lapsed into photography and the long, lonely process of being an accomplished photographer. "When I tried the first time to articulate myself in pictures, images or illustrations, I could not show what I wanted by drawings." That is what he's like. So the how-it-all-started tale is as gripping a drama as any. Nagel was an ordinary German bureaucrat until spurred by colour and dogged by idealism he travelled the world in search of fulfilment. And, he found himself. His story is extraordinary. "At the time of my civil engineering and architectural studies and later in practical work, I was forced to learn how to minimise complex systems into reduced detail," he reminisces tongue in cheek. Pushed further into the realms of art, he soon realised that he was a man with unrealised possibilities. The elegiac tone of his story is arresting as well as curiously convincing. "During my work as a manager in the past 33 years, I had to be a leader for up to 950 employees. You have to love people when you want to lead," he extrapolates. "This has been the secret of what I understood of being a successful leader, of being successful." But the problem with boastfulness is that it is by definition devoid of interest. To cut a long story short, Nagel pushed further into realms of devilish manipulation not of people, but of colour. He eschewed the placid banality of his everyday life. "You can dislike the whole organisation, but when you accept to love the single person as a representative of the total, you will begin to love the complete system and success appears automatically," he reminisces. Through the lens brightly he discovered himself. He might have been an uninspiring civil servant who seemed to have disliked his subordinates. His work was unremarkable, unfulfilling. In his spare time he practised the provocative art of photography. "Early on, I continually improved the way to express myself using colours. Light, colours and their interaction began more and more to be the basic theme. Warm yellow, bright red, deep blue -- many colours created spaces of transparency and luminosity." Increasingly immersed in colour he began to be exposed to the public gaze. His call for colour, repeated like a mantra, has far more passion than reason. Speaking of passion, as we frantically brought the interview to a close amidst the chaos of layout and production for this issue, Nagel cut a dash with a German hop skip and a jump, leaping lightly for his age and size, giving the lie to the dour image of his fellow beer-drinking Bavarians, much to our amusement. Nagel emerges from his photographs paradoxically clearer than when he was a technocrat, and far less mysteriously. Colour is entirely in keeping with his Teutonic logic.
