Youssef Nabil Sleep In My Arms Men Sexuality Identity

Youssef Nabil

Sleep In My Arms

M. Stevenson Gallery. Cape Town, South Africa. 2007. First edition. Hardcover. With dust jacket. Very good plus. Foreword by Tracey Emin. ISBN: 9780620387545. In this first monograph on his work, Youssef Nabil photographs young men in intimate situations, asleep or on the threshold of sleep, interspersed with self portraits, and sets up dreamlike moments that are imbued with a brooding sexuality. The book explores the interior and exterior worlds of drama, beauty, glamour, sexuality and identity. In Nabil’s hand-colored photographs, time is no longer a certainty. As contemporary images that embrace an aesthetic of a bygone era, we are made to recognize the inherent paradox of the photographic image –a static record of an already-past event.

Nabil’s images contain a (impossible) promise within them – a promise of halting, or even turning back, the clock. And in their impossibility, the images are both fantastical and ghostly. ‘Fantastical’ in the creation of a place free from the constraints of linear time or narrative, where bodies perform, are desired, or find rest. ‘Ghostly’ in the gentle, improbable 20th century palette of colors, where rouged cheeks and pale skin speak of a hermetically sealed moment outside of time. Ghostly too in that the subjects are forever locked in this flourish of youth, and in this moment, become markers of both beauty and decay.

A very good copy. Some edge wear to the dust jacket and to the boards and a few creases and light scratches to the DJ. Soiling in a very few spots. Internally sound, clean and bright. Stunning photos in this very scarce and fascinating book.

Youssef 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.

In his photographs, his preoccupations with fame, sex, loneliness and death are immediately apparent. Many of the famous sitters are photographed asleep, in the realms of dreams and rest, far from their public personas. Or Nabil photographs them in a glamorous manner befitting their fame, often set against a pale blue background, his gentle hand-colouring removing the blemishes of reality. In his staged photographs he creates scenes that recall Arabic cinema of the 1950s where the heroes and stars act out the broken dreams of love, life and sex. Interspersed throughout the series are self-portraits in liminal spaces on the edge of consciousness where he is seemingly unaware of the presence of the camera.

He colors his prints by hand, a technique that recalls the hand-colored family portraits that still adorn people's living rooms in Cairo. This unusual and distinctive medium disrupts our sense of time and place; his photographs are, and are not, images of our time.

Nabil's first collection of photographs, Sleep in My Arms, was published by Autograph ABP, London, and Michael Stevenson in 2007. Nabil was awarded the Seydou Keita Prize for portraiture at the 2003 Biennial of African Photography in Bamako, Mali. He has previous had solo exhibitions at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, in 2003; the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, in 2001; and the Third Line Gallery in Dubai in 2007.