Leon Boyadjian (Van Leo)

Obituary:
Leon Boyadjian (Van Leo)
By Nigel Ryan
Cairo 1939-45, and on to 1952, and even a little beyond: it is well-ploughed territory. The divisions, regardless of the magnitude of unfolding events, can come to seem surprisingly arbitrary, hopelessly so if your reference is the mostly anecdotal accounts of the period that have appeared sporadically in English over the past few decades. For Cairo had somehow inherited the cosmopolitan veneer that beguiled earlier generations of Alexandrian chroniclers: there were parties, and cocktails, and staggeringly beautiful women in plunging evening gowns wearing diamonds and flirting their way through endless evenings with a nonchalance that can hardly be imagined by those whose diamonds are paste. Or that, at least, is how it has come to seem. That this is not the truth, and certainly not the whole truth, doesn't really matter: images are thrown up and some of them stick.
Few have contributed as much to the fixing of that image than Leon Boyadjian, who in 1947 opened the studio on Rue Fouad, now 26th of July Street, from which he was to work for more than half a century. It was there that Van Leo was born: earlier, from 1941 till the opening of his own premises, he had worked with his brother, their prints jointly signed, first Studio Metro, subsequently Studio Angelo.
Then studio photography was virtually an Armenian monopoly in Egypt: the first of the studios to open, Lekegian, located conveniently close to the Shepheard's Hotel, proved profitable, and soon others were seeking a niche in the expanding market. Armand, Archak, Vartan, Alban all opened premises between Qasr Al-Nil Street and Opera Square, though Van Leo's own premises were, from the very beginning, intended to be different. The reception area was designed by Angelo de Ritz, a painter and one of the founders of the Egyptian surrealist group Art et liberté: it was modern, in the utilitarian sense, and minimal, though there was more than a hint of the theatrical in the incongruous hanging of maroon velvet drapes. An awkward juxtaposition, this ultra modern, clean-lined aesthetic overlain by suggestions of the stage and the movie theatre, and one that should have alerted customers that what happened in the studio might not be as straightforward as they initially supposed.
By 1950, three years after first opening, Van Leo was attracting a degree of attention not normally accorded to the jobbing photographer: in Surrealisme de l'esprit, an essay by Jacques Ovadia that appeared in the revue Je dis he is described as "a fellow with a brilliant smile and lively eyes, bending over prints or studying a profile, conjuring up the fascinating phantoms that people the most beautiful of dreams."
Above,
Self-portrait montages, 1945
and left, Teddy Lane, 1944
Van Leo's occasional association with Art et liberté:, though, was hardly the defining moment, and the work with which Ovadia's essay appears to be dealing is mainly restricted to the mid- 1940s, to the Van Leo who shaved his head for a series of multi-portraits refracted endlessly, superimposed one on the other. A multiple image of someone who has dressed down to dress up, who has shaved his head the better to show what he is not. It is this, and not much more, that constitutes Van Leo the sometime surrealist, it is a matter of props, of the dressing-up box, of not just looking strange but looking unnatural.
Leon Boyadjian arrived in Cairo with his parents in the aftermath of World War I, part of the great exodus of Armenians fleeing the heartlands of the crumbling Ottoman state. His first encounter with the camera was to take place in Zagazig, in 1928 or 1929: an Armenian photographer taking a picture of an Armenian family, not long arrived. Years later the same photographer would provide an introduction for Leon, then a disaffected student at the American University in Cairo, to Studio Venus, on Qasr Al-Nil Street, where he learned the nitty-gritty of the trade.
Van Leo's earliest forays as a professional photographer were to take place in a Cairo whose population had been swollen not just by the influx of refugees from war-torn Europe, but by the thousands of soldiers from all corners of the British Empire that, by 1940, had become an unavoidable feature of the city. Europe was at war, but for some in Cairo business was booming. And in the wake of the soldiers came a plethora of cabarets, revues, dancing troupes, many far from modest, a whole society of entertainers selling respite from the war. They needed to advertise, and the Boyadjian brothers offered free publicity shots in return for space in the programme, a mutually beneficial arrangement since it brought to their doors members of the audience, mostly soldiers, seeking souvenirs -- and that meant, mostly, portraits of themselves.
By the time Van Leo moved to Rue Fouad, he had already built a reputation as a portraitist and his customer base was expanding: alongside the cabaret artists, British civil servants and soldiers arrived bigger fish, rising stars such as Omar Sharif, first photographed by Van Leo in 1950, and established stars such as Fatma Rushdi, who sat for her portrait in the same year. It was in 1950, too, that Van Leo produced what has become his most widely circulated image, the by- now iconic portrait of Taha Hussein.
"You need," Van Leo told me when, in 1995 I arrived at his studio, "to have your photograph taken every ten years, if only to know how you looked."
It seemed, at the time, a remarkable conceit from a man who took pictures that do not even purport to show how you look.
For more than half a century Van Leo pored over his negatives -- he used always the widest available film -- recasting the images caught through the lens. Lines he did not like were removed, shadows accentuated: the print would be cropped, on occasion parts of the body removed and consigned to oblivion.
Sitting for Van Leo could be a trifle unnerving. Met in the reception -- by 1995 the original ultra-modernity of the space had assumed a decidedly retro veneer -- endless prints would be produced, to give the customer a "sense of what is possible."
It was an odd selection of images, and no doubt tailored to whoever was seeking a portrait. My selection included Van Leo's own favourite, a portrait of Teddy Lane, a South African dancer, taken in 1944. Lane's face had been covered in vaseline and then sprinkled with sand, the subject then placed in a black velvet bag with only the head emerging from the shadows. There was, too, a series of photographs of a Heliopolis housewife, who had arrived wearing 18 articles of clothing and demanded to be photographed 18 times, for each shot removing a garment until she was naked. Doria Shafik smiled from beneath savagely plucked eye- brows, Mohamed Abdel- Wahab from beneath an ill- considered wig with which not even Van Leo could do much. Youssef El-Sebai, he told me, arrived in 1953 for his portrait with four uniforms to change into. And all the time, quietly producing yet more images from boxes, Van Leo would watch until, his decision made, he would usher you into the studio proper, to sit, initially in the dark, on a circular dias raised in the centre of the floor. Behind the camera which his father had given him in 1941, he would consider the arrangement, shuffling for lights, turning them on and off, suggesting a slight adjustment of posture, admonishing you gently for never having realised that the left was your best side. And this could continue for hours. A week or more later you would be summoned by telephone, to view just four images, one of which you could select. A week after that and you would receive another telephone call, and told that your print -- enlarged by now, and painstakingly doctored -- was ready for collection. Van Leo retained the negatives.
Everything about a sitting for Van Leo appeared carefully contrived to avoid even a hint of the spontaneous. Nothing could be left to chance: among his thousands of prints are only a tiny number of outdoor scenes, and when he came across a face that interested him, a street vendor, or a beggar, they would be enjoined to come to the studio, where he could better control his effects. No surprise, then, that it is Lane's photograph -- the most artificial of them all -- that Van Leo pronounced his favourite. No surprise either that Taha Hussein should have been such a perfect subject -- the photograph was the result of just two poses, and lit completely naturally. What better model could Van Leo have wanted than a blind man who chooses always to wear glasses. What else could he demand from a subject beyond the subject not knowing what he looked like, let alone how he may want to look?
To emphasise style is to slight content, which is why it is pointless to search for character in Van Leo's portraits. He was never interested in anything so ineffable as capturing the soul of his sitters: that would have been a presumption, and he was a man with an old-fashioned sense of courtesy.
"Why," he asked, a little disingenuously, after showing me the pictures of the housewife, "do you think she wanted these photographs? Was perhaps a lover leaving?"
After 50 years of taking the kind of photographs Van Leo took no one was in a better position to know why she wanted the pictures: no one could better understand the metaphor of life as theatre, of Being-as-playing-a-Role. And if many of Van Leo's images seem to dove-tail into the glamour genre, it is because Van Leo early understood that glamour is prefaced on the essential not-thereness of the subject.
For the last two years of his life Van Leo was too frail to continue working in his studio and had been more or less housebound. The last decade of his life, though, brought rewards in terms of increasing recognition, largely on the back of public exhibitions of his work, both in Egypt and abroad, culminating in the award of the Prince Claus Fund prize in 2000.
Leon Boyadjian, b Jihane, Turkey, 1922; died Cairo, 18 March, 2002
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor