Van Leo at the Hammer Museum

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Van Leo, Self-Portrait (Sunday, November 1, 1942). © The Rare Books and Special Collections Library at The American University in Cairo. Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

Photographers have been investigating performance within self-portraiture before advancing technologies made it commonplace to toy around with identity and self-presentation. Famously, in the late 1970s, for instance, Cindy Sherman was photographing herself impersonating the sultry stars of Hitchcock or Antonioni films, creating images that examined gendered stereotypes and the instability of the presentation of self. Smartphones and image-driven social media have proliferated this practice, creating a generation of photographers for whom hyperbolizing for the camera is another part of traveling, eating a meal, or simply existing. But a recent show on view at the Hammer Museum evidenced that acclaimed Armenian Egyptian photographer Van Leo investigated the relationship between identity, performance, and photography long before either of the aforementioned moments in the cultural or Western art historical canons. In the exhibition, the late Cairo-based photographer’s first international survey, viewers were granted an intimate glimpse into the personal and creative life of an individual obsessed with using photography to document the self and its permutations. Although Van Leo only began to experience institutional recognition at the end of his lifetime, Becoming Van Leo showcased how his life and work were an early statement about the fluidity and multifarious nature of identity.

The exhibition was structured chronologically, beginning with the photographer’s childhood and spanning the entirety of his career, from his early experiments in the 1930s to his studio practice, which extended through the 1990s. The first section of the exhibition showcased photos of Van Leo, né Levon Boyadjian in 1921 into a middle-class Christian family that arrived in Cairo in the early 1880s, fleeing ethnic violence in the Ottoman Empire. He is pictured with family and schoolmates as he progresses from a small boy dressed as an angel to a young man in sporting clothes, subtly establishing an early fascination with costume and performance. These photos were accompanied by a mishmash of personal ephemera such as trophies, business cards, and books. Included in this early narrative were photographs taken in Van Leo’s first commercial photo studio, which he opened with his brother in their family apartment in 1941. Dubbed “Studio Angelo,” it catered to entertainment passing through Cairo looking for glamor shots, a genre within which Van Leo began developing the cinematic use of light and shadows he would later become known for.

At the center of the survey’s chronological loop, which wound along the gallery’s outer wall, were Van Leo’s self-portraits taken in the 1940s, representing a small selection of the hundreds that he took over the years. Largely shown for the first time on the occasion of this exhibition, these self-portraits were private endeavors—taken when the artist closed his studio to the public for a few hours each day. The vast majority depict Van Leo wearing various costumes and posed with props, each image constructing a different character. To become Jesus Christ, the Wolf Man, Zorro, or a host of other figures, he would grow his beard, shave his head, and alter his weight. In one photograph, our protagonist dons a blazer and full beard, his shirt buttoned impossibly high, as he points a gun at the camera. Framed as though the viewer is looking through a keyhole, Van Leo is brightly lit from below, creating harsh shadows that dramatically extend his eyebrows upward. Another Self-Portrait (Sunday, November 1, 1942) shows the artist slyly mimicking a film starlet. Boasting lipstick, a necklace, and button earrings, he stares just off-camera, the frame off-kilter. A dark dress slips down his frame, exposing his bare chest. His jaw is heavy set and his eyes a bit wistful, as though he might burst into tears—the viewer begins to understand the artist’s emotional commitment to his hyperbolic permutations of self.

Each of Van Leo’s self-portraits explores the many internal and external influences that molded his identity. The influence of both Hollywood and Egyptian cinema is entombed within the pages of his notebooks—on view in the exhibition’s central room—which are filled with the names, birth years, and birthplaces of celebrities as if these details were somehow integral to the artist’s inner world. Bequeathed to the American University in Cairo a few years before his death, these manuscripts witness the private time Van Leo devoted to cinematic icons. “Photographs, motion pictures, magazines—these were the stuff of dreams,” the exhibition curator Negar Azimi wrote of Van Leo’s work in Aperture in 2017. “The photography studio was itself a kind of dream machine.”¹ Beyond his detailed notes on celebrities, changing his name—from Levon Boyadjian to Van Leo—paid homage to the cinematic world he inundated himself with. Having fully internalized his beloved cinematic characters, Van Leo began performing a new, composite identity built from the many personas he saw on-screen—fully manifesting the dream machine.

In addition to the self-portraits and personal ephemera, Becoming Van Leo showcased some of the artist’s most significant public achievements. By his mid-career, he was well known for his photographs of famous Egyptian actors like Omar Sharif, Rushdy Abaza, and Samia Gamal. His photo of the actress and singer Shérihan, Shérihan. Actress. Photo before she was on screen (1976), shows a young woman dressed as a cowboy, gripping what might be the same gun that Van Leo had used in his self-portrait years earlier. Standing with her feet facing in opposite directions, she casts a long shadow behind her, lit from a high angle in a perfect example of Van Leo’s flair for dramatic lighting. Where this young girl would later become a celebrated actress and pop culture icon with a chameleon-like penchant for extravagant costume changes, she appears here as understated and ambiguous. In front of Van Leo’s lens, she becomes a vessel for the photographer’s visual thesis—that identity, whether performed for the camera or not, can be something multitudinous, uncategorical, and unexpected. His embrace of this slippage was well ahead of the cinematic and cultural norms of the era.

At a time when concepts of identity and gender roles were far more rigid and pervasive, Van Leo created a photographic world in which the self could be a composite—both a cowboy and a starlet. While Van Leo lived in a progressive city, the stars of his beloved cinematic worlds were type-cast, reflecting the rigid gendered and raced stereotypes that he remixed and pushed back on. He found grounding within the slippages of identity, remaking himself before the camera and performing various genders and personas. Becoming Van Leo tells more than simply the story of Levon Boyadjian’s journey to becoming the photographer Van Leo: It anticipates the way that culture has moved toward more expansive conceptions of gender, a road which Van Leo helped pave.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 34.

Van Leo, Becoming Van Leo (installation view) (2023). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Van Leo, Becoming Van Leo (installation view) (2023). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Van Leo, Miss Iliana. Italian. Hands on side of face (1950). Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum and the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.

Van Leo, Becoming Van Leo (installation view) (2023). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Van Leo, Becoming Van Leo (installation view) (2023). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Van Leo, Becoming Van Leo (installation view) (2023). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Van Leo, Self-Portrait (1945). Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum and the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.

Christie Hayden is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. She received her BA from the University of San Francisco and her MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the owner of OOF Books, an art bookstore and conceptual exhibition space. Her writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore City Paper, and others.

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