Tour #4
Last and Lost Photography Tour Tour Leader:
Paul Geday This photography-themed tour of Downtown was based on the research done for the “Studio Viennoise” exhibition held in 2012, which focused on the great portrait studios of the 1950s and 1960s. Most have disappeared; one of the last of them, Nubar Keropian of Studio Kerop, closed just one month before the tour. Geday’s photographic series Last and Lost also tracks these haunting traces. The tour followed the tracks and hunted for the remaining artifacts of these lost temples of glamour. It started with one of Downtown’s last operating studios, which now specializes in passport photos, but still maintains an impressive collection of hand-painted portraits in a very mysterious setting. The tour also stopped at “Bella,” a studio that has been active for more than a century. It concluded at the legendary Lehnert and Landrock.1 1 Tour was developed in collaboration with Paul Geday. Tour itinerary and data based on “Last and Lost” studios of Cairo (P. Geday), a work in progress that was part of “On photography, at Studio Viennoise” exhibition, © Paul Geday 2012-2015 All rights reserved including electronic publishing, databases, social media or otherwise. Photographs © Paul Geday, All rights reserved. Captions by Paul Geday, as part of the “Last and Lost” series.