Architectural historian Caecilia Pieri reflects on photographer Latif Al Ani’s work of the 50s and 60s, documenting the modern expansion of Baghdad and Iraq’s cities. Pieri is an associate researcher at the French Institute of the Near East, and the author of Baghdad: la construction d’une capitale moderne 1914-1960 (2015) and Baghdad Arts Deco (2003) among other publications. Latif al Ani was named a Laureate of the Prince Claus Awards 2015.
Paris, November 15, 2015.
Tahrir Square, 1961. Courtesy of the artist and the Arab Image Foundation.
I first discovered Latif Al Ani’s work when I began researching Baghdad’s modern architecture, a bit more than ten years ago. I had ordered thirty or so of his prints from the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, inasmuch as these could document the research I was leading on this modern capital city at the time of its expansion during the petrol boom in the 1950s. The greater part of the prints I worked with then, before becoming familiar with the rest of Latif Al Ani’s work, were prints he had taken with a Rolleiflex 6×6, in black and white. Some date back to 1950, when he worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company under the rule of the monarchy , others are aerial views taken as of 1960 for the Ministry of Information.
What immediately strikes one when looking at these prints, is their art of composition. In a recent interview*, the photographer stated that the final result was always in his mind at the moment he took the photographs. Indeed, each picture demonstrates his full mastery of the art of framing. This can be seen in a great number of prints which literally stage the diagonal line, photographs of the dams at Kut, or on the Euphrates, the Liberty Monument by Jawad Selim and Rifat Chadirji on Tahrir Square in Baghdad, or again that of a contest of pole-jumping in Mosul, or yet again the picture of a boat-bridge on the Tigris, which is divided into a set of triangular flat surfaces. In another instance, we have a fluvial landscape, its foreground barred by the curving vertical lines of three palm-trees. And yet the result is never stilted, each “composition” giving the photographed built work, landscape or moving gesture an emblematic density.
Tahrir Square, Baghdad, 1962.
Train station, Baghdad, 1961. Courtesy of the artist and the Arab Image Foundation.
Samarra Bridge, Iraq, 1961. Courtesy of the artist and Arab Image Foundation.
Musayib, Floating Bridge, c.1959. Courtesy of the artist and Arab Image Foundation.
Enhanced by the use of black and white photography, this compositional art is also served by the contrastive interplay of light and shadow. I have in mind these cubic volumes, minimalist as in a constructivist painting, which characterize the photograph of an emerging new suburb, amongst the many which were built on both banks of the Tigris. This geometric abstraction isn’t merely aesthetic. It underscores the modular repetitiveness of an industrially produced modern habitat, at the time the capital city was entering its initial phase of metropolization, and at a time where it became urgent to absorb the strong demographic surge, as well as to provide comfort and hygiene for the middle and working classes in full expansion.
Housing Project in Mamoun District, 1962. Courtesy of the artist and the Arab Image Foundation.
Shorja Street, 1960. Courtesy of the artist and Arab Image Foundation.
Among the most recently built buildings of Baghdad at that time, the Rafidain Bank, which had just been completed by the British architect Philip Hirst, embodying an authentic avant-garde statement. Its long, ship prow shaped pierced façade, efficiently rhythmed and streamlined by its four horizontal sunscreen bands, is exploited several times by Latif Al Ani : whether in his aerial views of the Rusafa district’s “ocean of the flat roofs”** amongst which the new bank seems to act as a vertical look-out or in a composition whose rigorous central perspective re-enforces its graphic abstraction.
The photographer took his documentary mission very seriously, and, as he has himself declared, felt a strong sense of responsibility. He felt invested with the duty to “preserve all that he saw”***. But whether it was aerial views of roads traced right across palm tree plantations in order to connect with the residential areas to come, with their still empty turn points, or the views of brand new factories with their sophisticated machines, or Baghdad’s covered markets with their electric signs, or model plantations, it was also Iraq’s modernity at that time that his work was documenting. An assumed modernity, one proud of itself, which attempted to combine a strong intent and creativity, seeking to transcend the explosive tensions at work in the Iraqi society. Even before the 1958 revolution, many of these prints were used in official documents and leaflets seeking to present Iraq through its youth, vitality, its constructions, its investments in education, its faith in the role of women, all of the maxims proclaimed by a young country, wealthy not only because of its rich civilisation but in terms of the promises of its future: yesterday’s modernity, a model for Iraq’s future?
Darbandikhan, c. 1960s. Courtesy of the artist and the Arab Image Foundation.
Courtesy of the artist and the Arab Image Foundation.
Al Aqida, High School, Baghdad, 1961. Courtesy of the artist and the Arab Image Foundation.
Shooting a tourism film in Babylon, 1962. Courtesy of the artist and the Arab Image Foundation.
These pictures are exceptional. First in that they document a no longer existing Iraq, but also because in 2003, the totality of the archives of the ministry they were part of, were looted and destroyed. The remaining prints thereby have the value of a precious national treasure. Far more than being merely an occasion for a nostalgic stroll, Latif Al Ani’s work provides a treasure trove of data for the Iraqi themselves, as well as for the international community of researchers, and they are absolutely irreplaceable to grasp an essential phase of the construction of modern Iraq.
I enjoyed the rare privilege and pleasure of meeting Latif Al Ani in 2013, in Baghdad, when I offered him a copy of my book Baghdad Arts Déco****, whose title in Arabic is : “Baghdad, al-‘imâra al hadîtha wa -lthurath” (Modern Architecture and Heritage). This elegant, refined and delicate gentleman leaned over to me and said: “It gives me great pleasure to see that even now Baghdad continues to be loved”.
Translated from French by Wendy Parramore.
* Invisible beauty (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2015), p. 161-197.
** In the words of Annemarie Schwarzenbach when flying over Baghdad in 1934.
*** Invisible Beauty, p.177
**** Whose French version benefited from a grant from the Prince Claus Fund, whom I will never be able to thank enough for their magnificent gesture.