Faces of Yemen

Sana'a, Yemen's capital, is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Legend has it that Sana'a was founded by Noah's son Shem after the ark landed. In a popular Yemeni joke, God returns to see what has changed on Earth over the millennia. An angel flies him over Europe and God doesn’t recognize anything. The same happens over America and Asia. Finally the angel guides them over Yemen, and God says “Oh, just like I left it!” I travelled to Yemen in 2010 to live with a friend, and photograph for his book. The landscape that I came to photograph was much more visually diverse, and historically richer than I expected. Yemen’s people are some of the world’s poorest, and as I travelled, I kept coming back to historian William Cronon’s observation about Native Americans “living richly by wanting little.” Yemen is on the cusp of complex political and environmental disasters that may soon put an end to this centuries old lifestyle, transforming it, as the New York Times recently wrote, into “the next Afghanistan.” All this aded a sense of duty and urgency to each day’s photography. Now, civil war is ravaging the country, and American supported Saudi bombings are daily news out of Yemen. When Yemen is in the news, there are plenty of photojournalists in the capital, but it was a rare opportunity to travel throughout the country and photograph with more artistic intent.