In the 1950s and ’60s, when Iraq was bursting out of an agrarian past and into the industrial present, the photographer Latif Al Ani was there to record his nation’s seismic shift and aftershocks. 

Al Ani shelved his career in the late 1970s, his archive was largely destroyed in 2003, and the Iraq he celebrated has since been pummelled by a succession of calamities and wars. Some of his surviving work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and he enjoyed a late-life glimmer of renown until his death in 2021.

Now, an invigorating show at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, entitled Through the Lens, makes the case for Al Ani as the peerless photographer of Iraq’s antiquities, not just as emblems of a glorious past but also as witnesses to hurtling but fitful transformations. He documented ruins and their fashionable admirers, and shot unpeopled modern buildings in harsh raking light, making them look like archaic monuments. 

He was an artist first and a reporter second. His images are meticulously composed and subtly staged; their messages are never shrill. A handful of pictures of the same desert ruin, Tāq Kasrā, taken over the course of a few hours on the same day in 1964, reveal utterly divergent views of 20th-century Iraq. In one, a shepherd in a white headscarf tends his flock on a rocky field, with the remains of the 1,700-year-old palace rising majestically at his shoulders. The scene is almost timeless; only a pair of automobiles parked in the distance signal that this is not the 18th century, or the 15th. 

In other images in that series, though, the same massive brick arch and high colonnaded wall serve as a picturesque backdrop to a tourist masquerade. Two western couples, the men in white button-down shirts and Apollo 13 haircuts, the women in crisp shirt-dresses, costume themselves in Bedouin robes and headscarves. The tableau comes with its own audience (a child looks on at the parents’ dress-up), exotic set, props, even a supporting cast.

One picture, in particular, quivers with psychological overtones and formal complexity. Husband and wife, outfitted for a day at office, drift apart, their gazes pulled in different directions. A blind musician, dressed like the shepherd, sits at their feet, drawing a bow across a homemade rebab’s single string. The asymmetrical composition, the harsh angularity, the air of emotional numbness and alienation, all of it playing out against the looming structure, carry Ozymandian overtones. 

Seen as a whole, though, the series is witty and biting, especially in the contrast between the goofy foreigners and their sombre, parched surroundings, between the visitors’ cheery urbanity and the local man’s grizzled impassivity. Creatures of the modern world perform their rites before ancient palaces that make their antics seem comically puny. The people will go; the stones will stay. 

Take a step back, and you realise that if the tourists are play-acting, Al Ani must be surreptitiously directing. The same blind musician turns up in another shot taken at the gates of Babylon, more than 100km away, raising the question of whether he should be considered a supporting actor or a prop. 

“I wanted to show our heritage against our present,” he recalled in 2015. Those are loaded words. That “our”, for instance. Iraq’s population was considerably more diverse in the 1960s than it is now, and it’s not obvious that today’s Arabic-speaking Muslims bear much direct connection to the ancient Sumerians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians and Persians who swept through the area, leaving their marks on the landscape. 

Al Ani seems to have absorbed these uncertainties and used them to dramatic effect. In 1960, he photographed Tāq Kasrā from the air, replicating a shot that Roald Dahl had taken 20 years before, while piloting solo across the desert during the second world war. The exhibition pairs that godlike perspective with an aerial view of 1960s Baghdad, with its broad boulevards, boxy apartment buildings and modern monuments. The de facto diptych almost deserves Gauguin’s weighty philosophical title, “Where do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

A handsome young man with a Clark Gable demeanour, Al Ani was certainly a nationalist, but the meaning of that term kept evolving. Colonial status gave way to an oil-rich Hashemite kingdom in 1932, and it was in that period that Al Ani landed his first job at the Iraq Petroleum Company, which he promoted in its house organ, “Ahl al-Naft” (People Of Oil). When a 1958 coup deposed the king and established a republic, he founded the photography section of the Ministry of Information. Later, he led the photography department of the Iraqi News Agency. He was always a government man, though sometimes a resentful one, until eventually the authorities forced him into premature retirement.

Each political chapter made his task a little harder and more necessary. Starting with the 1958 coup, he once said, the past “has been deleted. I felt there would be no stability. Men were eaten up and newcomers came. Pandora’s box was opened and ignorant people came to rule, who had no culture or understanding of the power they held. Fear was a major motive to document everything as it was. I did all that I could to document, to safeguard that time.”

By his own account, Al Ani’s beef was mostly with the state that employed him. But the show’s curators Pedro Azara and Roberta Casagrande-Kim don’t take him at his word. Having resoundingly established his stature as an artist, they go on to make a more tenuous argument. Al Ani, they claim, set out to chronicle an Iraq whose patrimony was being methodically exploited and despoiled by those pernicious holdovers of empire: archaeology and tourism. 

“Like bulls in a shop, archaeologists displaced the Ottoman and Arab populations from their ancestry, sabotaging and erasing their relationship with the finds in their territories,” Azara writes in the catalogue. “Following World War I, this archaeological treasure hunt was facilitated by the colonisation of a large part of the Middle East.”

It’s true that archaeology and colonialism travelled together and nourished each other’s missions. But trying to recruit Al Ani to that critique proves tricky, because the photos are more nuanced and less tendentious than the curators suggest. His portrait of the 9th-century minaret of the Great Mosque in Samarra is a study in texture and line: The rough grain and dune-like hillocks of the ground recede to an eroded brick wall and the spiralling sandstone tower beyond. It’s a view that a 19th-century European explorer might have savoured.

The effort to anoint Al Ani as a cultural freedom fighter leads the curators to distort their subject’s statements. “Most visitors were wealthy foreigners, generally North American tourists,” Azara writes, radically abridging Al Ani’s statement into the much terser: “Newcomers came. Pandora’s Box was opened.” As the full quote makes clear, Azara’s truncated version is deliberately misleading, suggesting that the photographer was inveighing against tourists instead of Iraq’s own government. An excess of rapacious visitors may trouble Azara, but it wasn’t Al Ani’s problem.

The exhibition heralds the arrival of a generation of Iraqi artists — mostly living abroad — who, in paying homage to the man known as “the father of Iraqi photography”, also reclaim their ancestral civilisation. Nadine Hattom, for example, was born in Baghdad, grew up in Australia and Abu Dhabi, and lives in Berlin. She plays a similar game to Al Ani’s, manipulating figures in a landscape, though she does it digitally instead of issuing instructions like “Stand there” and “Look here”. Unable to travel to Anbar Province, she instead sifted through public domain photos of US military operations there, then edited out the soldiers and left only their shadows. She is performing the same trick he did, serenading her homeland through the ghostly traces of yet another foreign invasion.

‘Through the Lens’ runs until February 25, 2024

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