In 2011, I began photographing the protests in Sana’a as thousands of people gathered to demand political change.

At the time, I was already thinking of the photographs as a kind of historical record, even if only intuitively. I kept taking my camera with no real plan, simply to capture moments and document the things I came across as they unfolded around me: crowds filling the streets, moments of anticipation and confrontation, conversations, gestures, humour, exhaustion and the strange rhythm that develops when people spend days together inside a political movement.

These images are fragments from that period and are part of a larger archive.

Looking at them years later, they carry a different weight. What was then an uncertain present has become the beginning of a much longer and more complicated chapter in Yemen’s history.

The photographs do not attempt to explain the uprising or everything that followed. They remain observations from within it, made at a time when change still felt immediate and the future was impossible to predict.

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