In 2011, I photographed the protests at Change Square in Sana’a. It was not only the scale of the demonstrations that caught my attention, but the faces that were present: people of different ages and backgrounds, brought together for a brief time by a shared hope for change.

Many years later, I returned to these photographs.

I do not know the names of most of the people I photographed. I do not know where they are now, what became of their hopes, or how the years of war that followed that moment have shaped their lives. They remain present in the photographs, yet are largely absent from the memory that later formed around those events.

This distance changed the way I looked at the images. What began as documentation of a political moment became, for me, an archive of unknown lives. These photographs do not speak only about the demonstrations themselves, but about memory, visibility, and the fragile relationship between being present in a historical moment and remaining present in its memory.

These are not portraits of political leaders or recognised figures. They are brief encounters with individuals who stood for a moment before my camera, among thousands of others, at a time when Yemen’s future still seemed open to many possibilities.

Looking at them today, I return to the same questions: Who were they? Where are they now? And what remains of a collective dream when the people who carried it disappear from view?

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