Known as “the father of Iraqi photography”, Latif al-Ani began his career in the 1950s while employed by the British-run Iraq Petroleum Company. Working for its in-house publication, al-Ani fixed his lens on a nation in transition; as his camera took in the new industrial infrastructures and a robust cosmopolitan culture, the 1958 Iraqi military coup occurred, the first of many regime changes that would for ever alter the look of the country.
Now in his late 80s, al-Ani returns to some of the locations from his photographs of a bygone Iraq for Sahim Omar Kalifa and Jurgen Buedts’s documentary. During his time at the ministry of culture and his post as the official photographer for various presidents – including Saddam Hussein – his body of work was journalistic, but it also carries significant aesthetic and archival value. After an endless series of wars and civil conflicts, large numbers of the architectural landmarks he captured are now in ruins. They live on only in al-Ani’s negatives, many of which were destroyed during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
