Terra Incognita: An Exploration of Bodyscapes - Amina Diab

Marwan El Dewey’s large black and white compositions of the female nude are rare photographs that take the viewer into a world of distilled abstraction. El Dewey (b.1950, Cairo) is a photographer, who, over a span of 50 years, has created an imposing body of work that we are just beginning to re-discover.

From the onset, El Dewey was determined to become the artist he is today, in spite of all the counter currents that crossed his path. Having grown up in an artistic family, he was exposed to all forms of contemporary and classical art from early childhood. At home, he was surrounded by works of contemporary Egyptian artists such Mahmoud Said, Salah Taher, Seif and Adham Wanly, Inji Efflatoun, Akeela Al Nakib among others, as well as art books containing the works of his favourite artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Mark Rothko. Having been tutored by renowned Egyptian artist Salah Taher, El Dewey became proficient in the art of composition and lighting, early on, in preparation for a career as a painter.

By some contrary fortune, in 1968 he was denied entrance to the School of Fine Arts in Cairo. He then decided to join the merchant navy and ended up spending three years travelling the seas and oceans of the world. This period of intense isolation and tranquillity, surrounded by large expanses of waters and endless horizons, would later influence El Dewey’s practice and his approach to composition. In 1970 he applied to the University of Texas Tech in Lubbock, USA, and was accepted to its School of Fine Art. By further misfortune, he was denied a travel document valid for the USA. He then joined the American University in Cairo to study Anthropology until 1973, when he was granted the possibility to travel again. Still deter- mined to study within the field of art, he decided to move to Paris to study cinematography.

With little funds, he arrived in the French capital and quickly landed his first job at Les Editions du Dauphin, one of the oldest publishing houses in Paris. He was tasked with documenting the various Americanisms that he encountered on the streets. He borrowed a camera and wandered the streets of the capital. Soon photography became El Dewey’s medium of choice and he started obsessively taking pictures of everything around him––people, children, street-life, trees, flowers, and nature at large. He recalls being so immersed in this activity that he did it all the time. As a young man, faced with a whole new world, he proceeded to record it in every way possible, in his efforts to make sense of it. He had the courage to experiment and the ambition to break with conventional visual codes to create a new formula. They expressed his personal engagement with the youth and energy of the city. The images he created were thoroughly modern and anchored in the present moment.

Living in a chambre de bonne, on a hot Parisian rooftop, nudity became an everyday event; a common place in the environment around him. By moving away from public spaces and into the privacy of his studio and personal living spaces, El Dewey began experimenting with nude photography, working with his neighbours and friends. The relationships he built with his models extended over long periods of time, which allowed him to explore new visual languages and deepen his practice.

Form and Light

For El Dewey, the human body offered endless possibilities of visual exploration. He worked incessantly, often throughout the night, to develop his negatives in his makeshift dark room. His bohemian Parisian life would quickly set him firmly onto the path of art photography.

To understand his work, we must recognise it as a product of its time, particularly vis-à-vis the development in colour art photography––a practice that was very much conversant during the 1970s and 1980s. Intuitively understanding the intimate relation between both representational and abstract painting with photography, El Dewey took heed of the traditions of composition, structure and light to compose smooth and alluring compositions of the female body. In the words of Mary Street Alinder, photography historian and biographer of Ansel Adams, “the painter [...] organises his subject to fit a preconceived space or formal pattern; the photographer analyses his subject into its ‘geometric’ structure and is obliged to define a space in which the subject will be suitably expressed. Painting is a synthetic process, photography an analytic process; a world of difference lies between them.”2 Other influences for El Dewey include early modernist photographers who looked at the figure more sculpturally. Like Edward Steichen’s large and painterly early prints from the 1900s, El Dewey set himself the task of acquiring painterly results in his photographs, whether through formal compositions or surface and material textures––painting with light as practice was perfectly legitimate.

El Dewey’s work is reminiscent of the work of Bill Brandt, the American photographer from the 1950s and 1960s. Brandt’s extended investigation of the female body, notably in Perspective of Nudes (1961), a series that was both personal and universal, sensual, and strange, collectively exemplifies a sense of wonder that is paramount to his photographs. Other contemporary influences include Kishin Shinoyama, Japanese photographer of the 1970s. Although similar in form, the two are dissimilar in treatment, where Shinoyama’s work was clearly more urban, intense and, in El Dewy’s opinion, misogynist.

With his dedicated interest in abstract forms, El Dewey explains, “the abstraction was in my head. It matured and began to appear in my work later. Isolated, simplified, I gave emphasis to the form, the body merging with the background.”3 With his strong command of corporeal abstraction, everything dissolves into ambiguous organic formations, turning the body into a terra incognita and distilling the world around us, to the most basic forms of shapes and lines. El Dewey crops out or angles limbs, folds arms into each other, inter- locks legs with bent knee and bare feet, allowing them all to take on complexities of their own. The rhythmic patterns, the intensely perceived sculptural forms, the subtle modulations of tone, are all trademarks of the artist’s self-made style.

Paris: A Living School

It was while working in a professional photography lab that El Dewey mastered the art of printing. In the early 1970s, he became the resident photographer of the Arab newspapers Akhbar al-Yom and Al-Nahar in Paris and covered events like the opening of the Centre Pompidou in 1977. In the same period, he worked for the record label, Polydore Disque, photographing bands and artists like Georges Moustaki, Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), Marie Paul Belle, Chantal Grimm, and Demis Roussos. Seeing his work published on the cover of records or in newspapers cemented his relationship with the camera, even if the images were commissioned.

Soon, he was introduced to Egyptian artists who lived in Paris at the time, such as Adly Rizkallah, Ahmed Nour El Din, Ramzy Yassa, Georges Bahgoury, and poet Ahmed Abdel Moety Hegazy. This group would include some of his closest companions and would form the first audience of his photography. Gripped by the large formats, the abstraction and smoothness of the compositions, they collectively encouraged him to exhibit his work.

On February 10, 1977, El Dewey’s first exhibition opened at Galerie la Galère,4 in the heart of the Latin Quarter of Paris. It showcased forty black and white photographs of nude studies and abstracted compositions, shot in the confines of the studio, and was made up of all the works he had produced thus far. The turnout was strong. But more than anything, it was a curious, short yet exacting review in Le Figaro that ascertained the exhibition’s success and changed the course of the artist’s career. Michel Nurisdany, famed art critic who championed art photography in the French daily’s art column, spot- ted, amidst what was described as a mix of easy shots, a rather remarkable and unexpected artistic vision in this young Egyptian’s work. The Parisian public took notice and shortly after, visitors crowded the gallery to see the works. For El Dewey, it was a formative moment that catapulted him into the art world and made him into the artist we know today.

El Dewey’s radiant nude studies are a passionate search for the connections of all things. As bodyscapes, they investigate the human body in an unending revelation of forms. Generally shot in black and white, the compositions are to be read as figure studies, and not portraits, since the identities of the models were averted and instead a focus is placed on the sculptural qualities and underlying meanings.

The transformation of the female nude body into geometrical shapes, lines and textures created their own realities; they formed another language and commentary on the exaltation of the banal. The photographs possess a certain degree of sensuality. The naked- ness of the mass of the body yields, with its curving softness and the smooth skin, a delicate sculptural quality that displays the beauty of form. But even from the context of masculine photographic practices, a feminist eye is discerned, which shows a natural reverence for the female form, and not the exploitation of it.

A certain minimalism in composition

As a nature lover too, El Dewey dives into minimalism. He is a true purist. There is an honesty to the work, a very palpable and visceral one. Centring on the body and leaving no extraneous space, the close-up details of his models shed all that is gratuitous. The viewer is taken on a journey of distillation that boils down to the essence of the human body, or in other words a return to something primal, bare and unadorned. As El Dewey explains, “it is a rigorous yet joyous process of reduction and simplification that attempts to reduce form into just one line.”5 The image I create embodies both light and shadow, space, and confinement, candour and reserve, conviction, and doubt. A perpetual dance between opposites defines it all. He adds “To reduce and declutter is my aid to clarity. I perceive the origin of every image in a tiny dot, the dot moves to create a line, that line seeks and joins another line till a form is born. This analogy of conception and birth is the closest I can get to the truth. Each image meditated upon gives birth to the next image.”6

The monochromatic black and white medium granted El Dewey artistic licence and newfound confidence in the medium. He began experimenting further with a monochromatic palette and gradually began to introduce colour. The artist explains that it was a slow and cautious process.7 In fact, El Dewey’s use of colour is comparable to the way colour was brought into the fold of fine art photography altogether. It was just over a decade earlier that colour was accepted in fine art photography. William Eggleston and his 1976 exhibition, staged at the MoMA is largely accepted as the starting point of colour photography. As Andrea Gern points out, “the history of colour photography only goes back to the 1980s.”8 With El Dewey, the introduction of a colour palette does not alter his monochromatic style; in other words, the subtle introduction of colour still echoed the toning of his black and white photographs. The photographs are certainly a product of their time and play to a contemporary 1970s aesthetic. But more than anything, this period can be considered as one of transi- tion, between the work done in Paris and the move to New York.

New York: A Closer Look

Prompted by the success of his Paris show and challenged by Nurisdany, Le Figaro art critic, who he met in Paris, El Dewey travelled to New York in 1978. He arrived with a large sized portfolio and proceeded to walk into the city’s renowned galleries to present his work. For six months, he was rejected by all. Recommended by a fellow artist, he submitted his work to The New School at the Parsons School of Design, for review. The work caught the eye of the jury, who saw a different approach to the representation of the nude figure. El Dewey was awarded an exhibition in the Photography Gallery, at the New School. On 7 October 1980, A Closer Look exhibition opened its doors, to strong acclaim. The press release described him as the instigator of a “virtual one-person artistic revolution in his homeland.” And added: “Through his skilful and sensitive use of the medium, Marwan’s photographic statement reveals an innovative, conceptual awareness of the nude in photography.

Working in black and white and colour, the images are frequently elusive, but always compelling.”9 For this show, he developed a more abstract treatment of the black and white nudes and introduced monochromatic colours into the work–an experiment he had begun in Paris.

A chance encounter with one of France's most known photographers, Lucien Clergue, at the Parson’s exhibition, was a validation for this work. Co-founder of Les Rencontres d'Arles photography festival and respected for his black and white studies of light, shadow, and form, featuring sinuous female bodies, dynamic sand dunes and seascapes extracted from the coast of the Camargue, Clergue had previously not responded to El Dewey, when he submitted his photos for the festival. But now in New York, after giving a lecture at the New School and visiting the exhibition, the French photographer was so enthralled by the work that he brought El Dewey and his photographs back to The Light Gallery, an elite New York gallery dedicated to photography, who previously had rejected El Dewey’s work. He opened the portfolio, spread the photographs around and began to show the gallerists what he called “real art”.

Another result of the exhibition was the acquisition of Untitled (1979) by a private collector Peter C Bunnell. The work eventually found its way into the photography collection of the Princeton University Art Museum, through a donation made by Bunnell. From the university catalogue, a description of Untitled (1979) states: “an evocative study of the potential of abstraction, this photograph of a figure in an interior simultaneously reads as a painting of a desert landscape. Here, the leg of an otherwise unseen body forms part of a monochrome field divided into three horizontal golden bands of sensuous texture and rich colour. El Dewey has framed the composition to emphasise the formal relationship between the undulating shin, knee and thigh, the velvet sheen and weave of the couch, and the matte glow of the wall behind.”10

Returning to Egypt

By 1982, after his return to Cairo, El Dewey made an impact on the local art scene by continuing to produce and exhibit abstract nudes in Cairo over the years. In parallel, he established himself as a pioneer in commercial practice and inspired a new generation of professionals that transformed how the photographic image was received and employed locally. Throughout the 1980s, he continued to exhibit his work locally and internationally, representing Egypt in international art events. Upon invitation by the Ministry of Culture, he showed his work at the Egyptian Academy in Rome and at the Bari Art Festival in Italy. An interesting aspect of El Dewey’s participation is the fact that he routinely exhibited his work, along- side painters and sculptors, it was through one of these group exhibitions that a Japanese curator noticed El Dewey’s work. Shortly after, a dedicated solo exhibition, which displayed some 30 photographs, was put together alongside the main exhibition. A few years later, he was among the photographers awarded the 50th International Salon for Photography prize in Tokyo in 1990. Kurosawa, famed Japanese filmmaker, was the head of the jury.

From the 1970 to 1988, El Dewey fought for photography to be recognised as a fine art in Egypt. He also pursued a personal battle to be admitted into the Syndicate of Plastic Arts, which he finally achieved in 1988. He was the first member to be admitted as an art photographer and until the year 2000, remained the only taswir daw’i (photography) artist to have gained entry, after which Nadeer Hashem, nominated by the artist himself, was accepted too. El Dewey recalls, “in my struggle to get photography admitted as a fine art, it is interesting to mention that in 1995, I was nearly awarded the Egyptian encouragement state prize for photography. Apparently, it was the first and last one. But after the review committee consulted the body of works, which was comprised of 20 nudes, El Dewey’s nomination was withdrawn.”11

From 1982 to 1990, El Dewey exhibited at Ayda Gallery,12 alongside painters like Hamed Nada, Ahmed Riad Said, Ahmed Nabil, Mosta- fa Dawestashi, Farghaly Abdel Hafiz, Gazbia Sirry, Mostafa El Razzaz, Mostafa Abdel Moety, Zakaria el Zeiny and other surrealist and abstract painters of the day. No other artists were exhibiting photography such as El Dewey’s abstract nudes which fit perfectly with the rest of the works on display.

Although El Dewey was exhibiting his nude photographs in galleries after the ban of nude models from the conservative turn of the 1970s eventually affected Egypt’s art scene by the late 1980s, and an attitude grew which was against nudity. Even though the image of the female nude begins with art from the ancient world, especially Egypt, by 2000, El Dewey set aside his artistic practice for a commercial one, no longer able to show his nudes in Egypt.

In 1996, he participated in a show in La Jolla, California, with Farouk Hosni, Youssry Hassan and others, where he showed his landscapes, and not the nudes. With time, his work evolved into travel and documentary colour photography, including landscapes of Egypt, aerial photography, a survey of Lake Nasser and other nature reserves, on behalf of entrepreneurs working with the Tourist Development Authority of Egypt. In 1996, a book on the Sinai containing his photographs was presented at the Arab-Israeli Peace conference in Sharm el Sheikh, as an official gift from the Egyptian state.

During this period, he led “The Image of Egypt” project, a project he adopted, which was adopted by the State Information Authority. For a year and half, El Dewey travelled across Egypt to document its natural environment. But a few years into the project, the authorities decided to abruptly put an end to it. El Dewey managed to pursue his travels across Egypt and to continue documenting vast areas of the countries that had hitherto remained unexplored. For three months, he travelled South- east of Egypt and visited Halayeb, Gebel Elba, as well as Roman archaeological sites along the way. The work he produced during this period is yet another unexplored but equally important body of work by the artist.

El Dewey & Photography in Egypt

With the creation of TINTERA in June of 2019, a space dedicated for fine art photography in Egypt, El Dewey has begun revisiting the nude photography he created in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and re-examining the contexts in which they were created. As El Dewey’s oeuvre of nude photography was exhibited for the first time, more than thirty years ago now, it is more urgent than ever to pull these photographers out of the archives and into the walls and to consider El Dewey as one of the rarest types of modern art photographers in Egypt still working today. Locally, it is fair to say that we have not seen works that equal the quality of El Dewey’s works. Looking back to the history of photographic practices in Egypt during the1940 and 1950s, we can trace a wave of modern photography studios that differ from the studios of Egypt’s golden era that date from decades earlier. But El Dewey’s practice yields a distinctive kind of photogra-phy, one that is created outside of the traditional commercial studio setting. By the 1960s, studios had become more playful, particularly with the introduction of colour photography. Yet photography as an art form encountered resistance from the Academy still and was not at all prevalent in local art exhibitions. Working photographers rarely experimented with abstract forms and light in the way El Dewey did. Self-initiated documentary photography projects by photographers such as Adel Gazareen, Mohamed Yousef (Head of photo at Al Ahram), both 20 years senior to El Dewey, were still producing traditional “Egyptian scenes”, and had little to do with conceptual art photography. Set against this context, the phenomenon of El Dewey and his peers some years later, photographers such as Nadeer Hashem, Ayman Taher and Hisham Labib, all of whom also photographed nudes, gains heightened importance, in an environment that frequently stifles daring and avant-garde practices. It is with this sense of urgency to recover these forgotten master- pieces, that Tintera is putting together the first solo exhibition of El Dewey’s nude photography in 30 years.

Amina Diab

Cairo, December 2021

Amina Diab is an art historian and curator based between London and Cairo, specialising in modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art. Most recently, she was Associate Curator on the first edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. Amina earned a MPhil. from the University of Oxford and a PhD. from the University of York, in partnership with Tate Modern. She is currently working on her manuscript entitled “A Transnational History of Modern Art in Egypt: Flâneuses et flâneurs des deux mondes”, which seeks to uncover a lost history of Egyptian modernism.