BIOGRAPHICAL CATALOG OF THE MODEM'S COVERS AUTHORS

142 2016 ARTISTS / PHOTOGRAPHER Modem Women’s Milano Modem Women’s Paris Fall-Winter 2016-2017 Covers by YOUSSEF NABIL Youssef Nabil (born 1972, Cairo, Egypt) is a photographer, based in New York. He observes his life as if he was in a cinema, watching and witnessing every minute of his own movie. Nabil ’s distinctive technique of hand-colouring silver gelatin photographs removes the blemishes of reality and recalls the heyday of Egyptian film. Nabil disrupts prevalent notions of colour photography and pain- ting, as well as assumptions about the type of aesthetics associated with art and those identified with popular culture. His particular medium evokes a sense of longing and nostalgia and allows his photographs to flicker between our time and another era. Nabil began his photography career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his friends acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later in the 1990’s, he began photographing artists and friends, producing both formal portraits as well as placing his subjects in the realms of dreams and sleep, on the edge of consciousness and far from their public personas. In 2010 Youssef Nabil exhibited his first short film “ You Never Left” . In 2015, Nabil was ready with another short movie “I Saved My Belly Dancer” at Nathalie Obadia Gallery in Paris. Youssef Nabi l’s work has been presented on numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues, including t he British Museum, London; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; North Carolina Museum of Art, North Carolina; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle; Museum of Photography; Thessaloniki, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art; Doha, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and many others. Three monographs have been published on Nabil’s work: Sleep in My Arms ( Autograph ABP and Michael Stevenson, 2007 ), I Won’t Let You Die (Hatje Cantz, 2008 ) and Youssef Nabil ( Flammarion, 2013 ).