Sunny to partly cloudy

_{Interview by Ruben Donsbach}

Mr. Ibrahim, is your book a counter-narrative to the common view of your country as of a war-torn and desolate?

The dominant visual narrative about Yemen is almost entirely shaped by war, hunger, and crisis. As real as these conditions are, they do not tell the whole story. I wanted to create space for images and stories that show Yemen as a lived reality: complex, intimate, human. The book does not deny the suffering. But it refuses to reduce an entire country to it. In this sense, it is a counter-narrative that, alongside loss and pain, also makes dignity and creativity visible.

The book brings together 14 photographers from three generations, living both in Yemen and in the diaspora. Do you still see something like a shared cultural DNA?

What connects these works is their shared sensibility. Whether abstract, conceptual, or documentary, they all revolve around an intense engagement with memory, identity, absence, or belonging. Formally, the photographs may vary greatly, yet they all share a quiet refusal of spectacle. Many of the works resist immediate readability. In this, I think, a cultural attitude is reflected—one shaped by instability, censorship, and the experience of displacement.

Photographer Boushra Almutawakel, for example, addresses questions of visibility and gender, which can appear as a critique of religious or at least cultural norms. To what extent is this representative of a broader discourse within Yemeni society?

Boushra’s work is political, yet it is also deeply cultural and personal. In her engagement with visibility—especially in relation to female bodies—she touches on central debates within Yemeni society: questions of self-determination, faith, as well as tradition and modernity. These discussions take place both within Yemen itself and in the diaspora, albeit in different ways. Her work shows that Yemeni women are not passive objects within certain cultural and religious structures, but active interpreters and critics of them.

How is the idea of “home” explored in the book?

For people in Yemen, home is something immediate and everyday. For those in the diaspora, it is often fragmented, remembered, or imagined. There is a dividing line, but not a clear one. In the diaspora, many work with nostalgia, distance, and even feelings of guilt, while those within the country itself are confronted with extremely urgent questions of survival. And yet, both sides engage with themes such as loss and connection. The book brings these perspectives together without reducing them to a single definition of  “home.”

In your own work featured in the book, you reflect on love and tenderness within the Yemeni cultural context. Is this focus shaped by your personal biography?

Very much so. I am interested in how love, intimacy, and tenderness function within the framework of Yemeni culture, which is often perceived from the outside as rigid or restrictive. I wanted to show how relationships are shaped by social expectations, family, distance, and faith. I am not trying to generalise the Yemeni experience, but rather to insist on the emotional complexity that exists and is visible—even if it is rarely represented.

Can the younger generation help shape political as well as cultural change?

They already are, even if this is not always immediately visible politically. Culturally, however, an enormous amount is happening: there is experimentation, questioning, and reimagining—often in the fields of art and photography and within digital spaces. My hope lies in the persistence of those who continue to create, to question, and to imagine future possibilities despite extremely difficult conditions.

“Photography from Yemen” was published by Makan Press in New York City and curated by Ibi Ibrahim and Lizzy Vartanian.