Youssef Nabil: Cinema

Youssef Nabil... Lonely Pasha, Cairo, 2002 (Hand-coloured silver gelatin print, 40 x 27cm, Edition of 10). From the exhibition Youssef Nabil: Cinema at Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. "...The exhibition will bring together hand-coloured photographs of celebrities and friends, self-portraits, and scenes staged over the past 15 years. Nabil was born in 1972 in Cairo. He studied literature and began producing his photographs while still living there. In this time he took many glamorous portraits of singers and stars such as Natacha Atlas, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssra and legendary belly-dancer Fifi Abdou. He later moved to Paris and New York, where he has continued to produce haunting self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt, as well as portraits of fellow artists, many of them from the Arab world, including Ghada Amer, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Tracey Emin and Zaha Hadid."