Reconstructing Van Leo’s life a posteriori to answer the question of who he was might sound like a formidable task. However, his work, especially that of his early days, is indeed worth rethinking. Cairo was Van Leo’s home and is the natural location for a vast collection of his portraits of mid-twentieth-century cosmopolitan Cairene society. In 1998 Van Leo had donated to AUC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library the negatives and prints from his studio's archives produced between 1941 to 1998, his work tools, photographic equipment, and library as well as his personal photographs and correspondence between members of his family. Although these photographs have been viewed as a bit too narcissistic, they are nevertheless iconic images, initially inspired by Hollywood’s style of photography. Van Leo depicted a section of Cairo’s cosmopolitan society, photographing an abundance of personalities from the entertainment world, from fashion models to authors and Egyptian celebrities of the so-called Golden Age of Egyptian cinema, between the 1940s and the 1960s. In the three-volume book " Becoming Van Leo" (2021) by Karl Bassil in collaboration with Negar Azimi, both members of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, we see, for example, the portrait of a young Omar Sharif first photographed by Van Leo in 1950. We also see a picture of Farid Al-Atrash, the composer, singer, and actor of Syrian origin, whose portrait is a rare case in which Van Leo placed his signature in Arabic. Several of his self-portraits are surrealist-tinged. The essays and images featured in the catalog of the exhibition " Van-Leo: The Reluctant Surrealist" curated by Ola Seif and Salah Hassan, and hosted in 2018 at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, question the artist’s connection to the Egyptian Surrealist movement, “Art et Liberté'' group (active from 1938 to 1948), which was affiliated with the international movement. The World War II had just begun. Van Leo elaborated some of the aesthetic positions characteristic of his grotesque photomontages and complex studio sets which display a superb use of light: particularly the self-portraits realized in the 1940s, which echo Man Ray and Maurice Tabard.