Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde announces representation of Latif Al Ani

Latif Al Ani at Sulaimaniya, North Iraq, 1957. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, in collaboration with the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut, is delighted to announce the representation of Iraqi photographer Latif Al Ani (b. 1932, Karbala) and welcome him to the gallery’s programme in advance of his upcoming solo exhibition from 18 November to 28 December 2019.

With the title Vetera novis augere - ‘augment the old with the new’ - the solo exhibition of Latif Al Ani celebrates not only the organic continuity between past and present (and into the future), but also the transmission process from older to younger generations. Through the four exhibited series bringing to attention the thematic foci of Architecture, Landscape, as well as illustrating Modernity along with 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.

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.

Whilst on assignment for the Iraq Petroleum Company to document the historical moment of the modernisation and industrializing of Iraq of the twentieth century, Al Ani criss-crossed the country and was also the first photographer to have the opportunity to shoot aerial views of Iraq. On the side, he developed a singular aesthetic language that challenges the social and documentary photography canons of that time. Instead, the plurality of subjects he photographed, from archaeology sites and historical monuments, street scenes, to imposing landscapes, as well as his unconventional frames broken by architectural sharp lines, or the visual emphasis of his compositions with hard light casting shadows, demonstrate the experimental approach of the photographer. He undeniably considered photography as an artistic medium, thus contributing to early postmodern debates about the testimonial value and status of the documentary image.

Al Ani started his career as a photographer for the Iraq Petroleum Company in the 1950s and, later in the 1960s, rose to the post as the Head of Photography at the Iraq News Agency. The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war prompted his decision to cease his photographic journey once and for good.

In 2000, artist Yto Barrada met Latif Al Ani during a research mission in Iraq with Wilfried Blanchard from which Barrada brought his practice to the attention of the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut. Since then the foundation has acted as custodian preserving Al Ani's archives.

In 2015, Al Ani participated in the group exhibition Invisible Beauty, at the National Pavilion of Iraq organized by the Ruya Foundation at the 56th Venice Biennale. The exhibition later toured to S.M.A.K. (Museum for Contemporary Art), Ghent (2016) and the Erbil Citadel, Iraq (2017). Latif Al Ani's first eponymous monograph published in 2017 by Hatje Cantz, won the prestigious 2017 Historical Books Award at Recontres d'Arles. In 2018, the photographer's work was part of the group exhibition Bagdad Mon Amour at Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris followed by an important survey exhibition entitled Latif Al Ani: Through the Lens 1953 – 1979 at Sharjah Art Foundation. Iraqi film director Sahim Omar Khalifa and Belgian filmmaker Jurgen Buedts are currently producing ‘Iraq Invisible Beauty’ , a documentary dedicated to Al Ani’s unique visual archive of Iraq during the 1950s through the 1970s. The film will give a profound insight into the country's Golden Age, widely unknown to Westerners and even Iraqi people themselves.

In 2015, Al Ani became a Prince Claus Laureate.