Peter Schlesinger Documents a Yemen That No Longer Exists

“Girls in Yemen wore these pointy hats called gargush.”

In 1976, Peter Schlesinger was living in London, working on his paintings, when his boyfriend, the photographer Eric Boman, was invited to shoot a fashion story for a French magazine in the Republic of Yemen. It was no ordinary assignment, at least not in terms of the location. Yemen had just ended a violent civil war and was still largely an unknown territory for foreign visitors. Schlesinger recalls saying to Boman, “I want to go.” As it happened, he had just seen Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of Arabian Nights, which included dreamy scenes shot in the country on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and he was intrigued by the haunting beauty of the landscape. Under the guise of serving as Boman’s photo assistant—“I actually did load film and help carry bags”—Schlesinger spent just over a week in Yemen, and in that time he got a rare look at a republic still recovering from the recent unrest. Thankfully, Schlesinger brought his trusty Pentax camera along on the trip and aimed his lens at the mountain villages, old forts, and city markets—as well as the everyday routines, customs, and dress of the people—so seldom seen, let alone photographed, by visitors. 

In recent years, as Yemen has tragically fallen back into war, Schlesinger kept recalling his time there nearly five decades ago. He pulled out the negatives from his archive, and the result is his latest photography book, Eight Days in Yemen, out this spring from Damiani. Schlesinger is celebrated for his portraits of artists and bon vivants, but the Yemen series reveals his extraordinary skill for capturing landscapes and reportage. There is so much life, color, and beauty recorded in these scenes, which take on additional heft with the realization that many of these remarkable places no longer exist, casualties of the most recent civil war. In his diary entry for Sunday, February 8, 1976, Schlesinger wrote, “Long drive all way to Saada and back. Fantastic.” Now we can take that long drive with him.

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“We drove from Sanaa to Sa’da through what our driver said were the Biblical cities of the plain and needed government permission to get through military checkpoints.”

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“This house with the blue and white pattern was in a different style from all others that we saw on the trip.”

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“A fruit and vegetable garden in the center of Sanaa surrounded by spectacular ancient architecture.”

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“Sitting in a bosun’s chair, a lime plasterer repairs a tower.”

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