Located on Malika Farida, one of Cairo’s most modern and Western streets in Cairo, Studio Souren operated throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Only the proprietor’s name is known and his background details are missing. The few discovered photographs from this studio are all portraits which appear quite rarely in archives or auctions. However, the technical and aesthetic quality of these photographs suggests that this photographer was a master of his métier and had a highly developed individual photographic style.

As with most of his contemporary Egyptian-Armenian celebrity photographers, Souren relied on the techniques of glamour photography and put an emphasis on surface beauty and eroticism as the key components of the individual's image in his female portraits. And yet, the portraits from this studio are markedly different from the trademark chiaroscuro dramatism of Angelo, Alban, and Van Leo studios, relying instead on more subtle, lyrically romantic atmospheric effects. The name and legacy of this forgotten Armenian photographer should certainly be rediscovered and assume its worthy place among the cast of modernist Armenian studio photographers of mid-20th century Egypt.

Vigen Galstyan, 2018