Youssef Nabil: I Won't Let You Die

Louise Bourgeois, Andreas Gursky, Zaha Hadid, Shirin Neshat, David Lynch, Omar Sharif, Sting and Naguib Mahfouz--these and other notables from the worlds of art, film, music and literature have posed for Egyptian photographer Youssef Nabil's camera over the past two decades. Born in Cairo in 1972, Nabil took his first portraits of friends after he finished studying literature in the early 1990s. He soon moved to New York and Paris, where he worked as an assistant to photographers David LaChapelle and Mario Testino. Nabil's photographs--hand-colored in the old tradition--reflect a preoccupation with loneliness, sexuality and death, though these themes are tempered by a visual language that betrays a nostalgic longing for the glamour, elegance and drama of the Golden Age of Hollywood. This monograph, Nabil's first, is a comprehensive collection of photographs of celebrities and friends, self-portraits and staged images from the past 15 years.