From the air, everything is beautiful but as soon as you land again you see also the misery and the ugliness.” I saw contrast more clearly between the ugly and the beautiful. “I saw things in a different way from the air,” he recalls. There are, of course, scenes fit for the pages of the IPC magazine such as dams, bridges, a housing project in neat rows in Baghdad, but his travels gave him the opportunity to take photographs from the air and create images from what was a radical perspective for the time. Later he moved to the Ministry of Information (now Culture) because, he says modestly: “I was the only one in Iraq who knew how to develop colour photos.”Īl Ani’s preoccupation was to create beautiful images. Clutching his Rolleiflex 6圆 with its 35mm film he took pictures of agriculture, workers and machines which fitted in with the government’s socialist message of the time. He became a trainee on the house magazine of Iraq Petroleum Company with the brief to take pictures of the oil industry. He was the first to experiment with photography from the air and even more importantly he was the first Iraqi to offer a portrait, not of a colonised people, but of ‘his own people’ setting up a mirror between the eye of the photographer and the eye of the people.”Īl Ani, who still lives in Baghdad, was bought a Kodak box camera by his brother when he was a mere 15 in 1947. Now 86, his ‘rediscovery’ has been undertaken by Tamara Chalabi, co-founder of the Ruya Foundation which was formed by a group of expat Iraqi art lovers to preserve their country’s culture.Ĭhalabi came upon Al Ani’s work when she was seeking out contributors for the 2015 Venice Biennial which she co-curated and this year she helped publish the first monograph of the artist’s work which won the Historical Book Award at the photography fair, Les Rencontres d’Arles.Ĭhalabi says: “Latif was a major player in the visual history of the Arab world. He captured a fleeting period of increased cosmopolitanism and openness in his country, a time of nigh-Utopian contrast to today (according to some) when many of the streets and buildings he photographed have been destroyed in the never-ending years of violence and when casualties have run into the many, many thousands. A moment of optimism captured in rich black-and-white images by an Iraqi photographer, Latif Al Ani.ĭubbed the founding father of his country’s photography, he has been, to be more accurate, the invisible man of the art form, one who remained forgotten for almost 40 years but now celebrated with the first exhibition of his work in the UK at the Coningsby Gallery, London (Until December 16). These are scenes from what some call Iraq’s golden age, the twenty years between the end of colonial rule in 1958 and the beginning of the war with Iran in 1980. Streets lined with Chevrolets and Mercedes-Benzes, western tourists posing by ancient ruins, picnicking families… above all, happy, smiling faces.
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