The photographer Latif al-Ani was destined to capture Iraq’s transition to modernity. Born in 1932 in Karbala, he purchased his first camera at the age of 15, inspired to document life and the people around him. In 1953, he joined Ahl Al Naft (People of Oil) magazine as a trainee photographer under the British expatriate Jack Percival, who helped him develop his aesthetic eye. In 1960, he was hired by the Ministry of Culture, where he was tasked with creating a photographic archive of the country, which at the time was emerging as a regional power partially due to increased business around Iraqi oil reserves. In his work for these two organizations, al-Ani was granted exclusive access to the inner mechanisms and the people within Iraqi society, revealing an extraordinary moment in the history of a country that has since been dominated by political strife and war. Yet his practice was short-lived; al-Ani stopped taking pictures in 1979 due to the growing storm of authoritarianism leading up to the Iran-Iraq War.  

When viewed in 2018, al-Ani’s images appear to be rooted in nostalgia and anticipation, serving to highlight the optimistic visions of the past. Shown in full at the Sharjah Art Foundation in an exhibition titled “Through the Lens 1953–1979,” the archive traces al-Ani’s career, from his early years as a young photographer on oil drilling sites to his travels abroad. Although a modernist at heart, al-Ani was attracted to the ruins of great Iraqi civilizations and was driven by a curiosity to explore how these monuments might function in the country’s transition to modernity. For example, Family from the American Friends of the Middle East Organization on a Visit to Iraq (Ctesiphon Arch, Iraq) (1964) depicts a couple of affluent-looking, middle-aged American tourists standing in front of an ancient monument in Baghdad, their explicit Western sensibilities clashing with the appearance of a blind local musician playing a stringed instrument nearby. Similarly, Ancient City of Babylon (Shooting a Film on Tourism in Arab Countries, Hillah, Iraq) (1970) features a smartly dressed European woman posing against a backdrop of ancient ruins for a foreign tourism campaign. These scenes suggest a tension between history and modernity, as well as illuminating the contrast between foreign and local—another recurring motif in al-Ani’s body of work. Additionally, there is an element of voyeurism in these images that suggests that, at the time, heritage was being refashioned as a product to be consumed by the outside world, and that nostalgia was being exploited as a promotional tool.