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Iraqi photographer Latif Al Ani (b. 1932, Karbala) presents Vetera novis augere - ‘augment the old with the new’ bringing attention to the themes of Architecture, Landscape, Modernity as well as Daily Life and Portrait photography. Latif Al Ani captured, mostly in black and white, the transformations in urban and rural Iraqi society, offering a unique gaze and testimony of the transitional and pivotal moment of the late 50s and early 60s in Iraq.
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With a career spanning the late 1950s to the late 1970s, a tumultuous time in global history documented elsewhere by fellow photographers Li Zhensheng in China, David Goldblatt in South Africa, or Ernest Cole in the USA, Latif Al Ani is today considered the founding father of Iraqi Photography. During these two decades, the photographer produced an extensive and invaluable archive and document of a shifting socio-political, economical and cultural landscape in Iraq. These traces of Iraq's cosmopolitan Golden Age are now lost or no longer exist.
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Architecture
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Latif Al Ani, Feast day in Baghdad 1960, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Banks Street, Baghdad, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Child in a modern house, Baghdad, 1964, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Aqrah, Nineveh, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Samarra bridge, Samarra, 1960, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Haidar-Khana Mosque, Rashid Street, Baghdad, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Ziggurat at Aqar Quf, Abu Ghraib, Baghdad, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, View of Rashid Street and the Mirjan Mosque, Baghdad, 1960, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Old house, Adhamiya, Baghdad, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, A House in Baghdad 1960, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Offices on Rashid Street, Baghdad, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, US couple at Taq Kasra (Ruins of Ctesiphon), Al Mada'in, Salman Pak, Baghdad, 1965, 2019
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"Of the twenty-nine photographs on view in “Vetera Novis Augere (Augment the old with the new),” all but one are black-and-white. Alongside aerial photographs of mosques and railways commissioned by the Iraqi Petroleum Company in the 1950s, images of the capital taken in the early 1960s evoke years of flashy cosmopolitism. The newly established Iraqi Republic was flush with oil money, and Al Ani illustrates this wealth with sleek cars seething down the city streets, in living rooms replete with Bauhaus furniture and floating marble staircases. Most compelling are the photographs of women taken during Abd al- KariÌ„m QaÌ„sim’s liberal prime ministership. In Music lesson, School of Music, Baghdad, 1960, a female student cradles an accordion with an expression of fierce concentration, while the woman in cat-eye sunglasses and posed against a sedan in Portrait of an Iraqi lady, Baghdad, 1961, appears formidable and footloose at once."
Izabella Scott, Latif Al Ani at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Art Forum International, 2020
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Portrait
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Latif Al Ani, Bust from Al-Hadar (Hatra City) 1960, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Little girl in front of her home, Hit, Anbar, 1962, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Salt collectors in south of Baghdad, 1963, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Family picnic with Mrs Latif Al Ani (on the right), Balad, Salah Al Din, 1970, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Latif at Sulaimaniya, North Iraq, 1957, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Portrait of an Iraqi lady, Baghdad, 1961, 2019
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"It is tempting to read Al Ani’s pictures as treatises on the transitory nature of any cultural epoch. He stopped shooting in 1979, when Saddam Hussein’s brutal ascent and the ensuing war with Iran made it difficult to photograph in public. Much of his archive was lost in 2003, during the US invasion. What the Arab Image Foundation has managed to protect of his oeuvre provides a rare window onto a culture since suppressed by violence, US-led and otherwise."
Isabella Scott, Latif Al Ani at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Art Forum International, 2020
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Modernity
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Latif Al Ani, Industrial School, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Women's Day Festivities, Rashid Street, Baghdad, 1962, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Construction of oil well, 1960, 2019
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Nature and Landscape
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Latif Al Ani, Waterfall at Gali Ali Beg, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Waterfall in North Iraq, 1961, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Border between Iran and Iraq, Hadji Omran 1960, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Date palm farmers, Baghdad, 1962, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Date Palm in Basra, 1959, 2019
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Latif Al Ani, Valley in North Iraq, 1960, 2019
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The work of Latif Al Ani (b. 1932) has been presented in many group exhibitions including the National Pavilion of Iraq, organized by the Ruya Foundation and curated by Philippe Van Cauteren, at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) that toured to S.M.A.K. (Museum for Contemporary Art), Ghent (2016) and the Erbil Citadel, Iraq (2017), as well as Bagdad Mon Amour at Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2018) curated by Morad Montazami. An important survey exhibition curated by Hoor Al Qasimi entitled Latif Al Ani: Through the Lens 1953 – 1979, was presented at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2018), while he also participated in Crude, the inaugural exhibition of Jameel Arts Centre, UAE (2019), curated by Murtaza Vali. Al Ani’s first eponymous monograph, published in 2017 by Hannibal Publishing (and Hatje Cantz), won the prestigious 2017 Historical Books Award at Rencontres d’Arles. Al Ani is also the subject of a documentary dedicated to his unique visual archive of Iraq during the 1950s through the 1970s, produced by Iraqi film director Sahim Omar Khalifa and Belgian filmmaker Jurgen Buedts entitled Iraq Invisible Beauty. In 2015, Al Ani became a Prince Claus Laureate.
