Put a face and a place together, and the next thing is art -- if you have photographer Khaled Guweili's talent, as Osama Kamal finds out The key to photography, as anyone will tell you, is lighting. It is through this window that images can pass from reality to a world of dreams, the artist Khaled Guweili told Al-Ahram Weekly. He should know, as it is through the images he captures with his lens that a parallel world unfolds to the viewer. A master of lighting as well as great humanist, Guweili seeks to illuminate not only the physical attributes of our world, but also some of its social aspects. Guweili admits to being prejudiced. When class lines are drawn, his art takes sides. Through his art, Guweili sides with the poor and the underdog, and then lingers to tell the story of the ones left behind. His exhibition, "A Journey in Faces and Places", held recently at Badrakhan Centre and Library in Al-Haram, will take you out of the trodden path. The only well-known face in his exhibition is that of the late cinema director Radwan El-Kashef. As you may recall, El-Kashef had the same humanist approach in his film career. His films focussed on the salt of the earth, on people who are untouched by wealth or glamour, on people who may not have a say. His three feature films Leh ya Banafseg (Why, Violet?), Al-Saher (The Magician), and Arak Al-Balah (Date Wine) were all about the poor and forgotten. A less known film, Al-Baah Al-Motagawelloon (Street Peddlers), is, in Guweili's view, one of the best short films in the history of Egyptian cinema. The photograph of El-Kashef is a tribute to a partner in ideology and fellow artist who, like Guweili, sought the joy in the hearts of simple people -- and wanted to share it with the rest of us. Guweili and El-Kashef were twin souls. Guweili was born in 1949 and El-Kashef in 1952, and they studied philosophy at the same college, albeit three years apart. While El-Kashef studied film and turned professional, Guweili experimented with multiple venues of artistic expression. He wrote short stories, releasing his first collection, Tuqus Al-Azaa (Rites of Mourning) in 1998. He also wrote two stage plays for Al-Warsha, Dayer Dayer (Round and Round) and Gazir Al-Layl (Flow of the Night). Since childhood, Guweili has been an avid photographer. Self-taught, he learned the secrets of lighting from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. He believes that the two books by Da Vinci and Paul Klee on the theory of light and composition -- both were recently translated into Arabic by artist Adel El-Siwi -- are essential for photographers and should become essential reading in all film and photography schools in Egypt. Until recently Guweili had not taken part in any exhibitions, nor staged a solo show. Now, at 60, he is changing his mind. The level of appreciation for visual arts, he says, has risen over the years. "Image is the language of our modern world," he tells me. Guweili maintains that the only language that humanity can understand without barrier is that of imagery. "Images have summarised history and brought it back from the dead. It has transcended geography by crossing borders and language barriers. Thanks to the improvement in communication technology, the images move around, flashing in front of millions at the same moment," he says. The international website www.seenby.com recently selected some of Guweili's pictures for posting. The site employs hundreds of editors worldwide to seek out outstanding pictures and protect them against piracy. Guweili went on several tours with Al-Warsha. He even travelled to Iran in the only visit by an Egyptian theatre group to that country in 2002 as the only Arab theatre company that participated in the Tehran theatre festival that year. He reports that Iranian theatre is just as enchanting as Iranian films, which have won acclaim worldwide. Guweili contributes articles to various Cairo-based publications and has worked as a professional photographer for several newspapers and news agencies. In the journey he has taken with faces and places, Guweili depicts pictures of people who smile despite their harsh surroundings, who keep hope alive where poverty and misery vie to break their soul. He tells me that there is a pact between the photographer and the subject without which these pictures would not be possible. This pact is obvious in his pictures. Guweili's subjects appear in the normal milieu, not at all posing. They are sitting and walking, talking and working in the backstreets and the market, sometimes even at home. Just as every individual brings along a certain colour, places do too. For Guweili, the place matters, for it is the context in which human emotions find their expression. Places are the inanimate parallel of faces. Places bring context and retain character and essence of the people who live and work in them. Put a face and a place together, and the next thing is art, if you have Guweili's talent. In his exhibition, Guweili searches for the inner happiness that resides in simple souls, for the joy hiding in their psyches, and for a glimpse into their mood. Examining Guweili's pictures one is reminded of the work of the Armenian-Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002), perhaps the leading portrait photographer of the 20th century. Like Karsh, Guweili goes beyond the physical reality to explore the emotions and mood of his subject. Both employ light with exceptional brilliance, both seek human essence, with one difference. Guweili is obsessed with the underprivileged. His work focuses almost exclusively on the marginalised and less fortunate, while Karsh immortalised celebrities. Karsh's photographs interpreted the rich and famous to the public. Winston Churchill, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein all posed for his camera, mostly in studios or under carefully designed lighting. Guweili does just the opposite. Guweili captures faces in their normal habitat. For him, the place is part of the character, part of the message, of the reality he seeks to convey. The artist, he tells the Weekly, exists solely through the eyes and words of others.
