Youssef Nabil was born on the 6th of November 1972. He is an Egyptian artist and photographer. Youssef Nabil began his photography career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his subjects acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later in the 1990s, while working as a photographers' assistant in studios in New York and Paris, 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 awareness, far from their daylight selves.
On his return to Egypt in 1999 he further developed his hand-painted photography, with portraits of writers, singers and film stars of the Arab world. Since returning to Paris and New York in 2003, he started producing self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt. This series that has evolved over the years is characterised by liminal scenes in which he lingers between worldly realities and serene dreams, loneliness and fears of death.
Nabil's distinctive technique of hand-coloring silver gelatin prints removes the blemishes of reality.