What could I say about Yemen that did it justice. I tried in my journal to work it honestly. I tried with 60 rolls of black and white 120 film to translate the experience. That hot, spare and beautiful Ramadan.
No eating or drinking anything between sunrise and sunset. The faithful waiting for the moment. The cannon booms from the mosque in the afterglow of the day. KABOUMMM and a frenzy of quat buying, tea drinking and food eating begins in the suqs and squares and oases and towns all over the country. Everyone happy, elated laughing and joking sitting down together as one nation.
And you know what, people always wanted me to share and be part of their Ramadan, their community, their Yemen. I travelled all over the country with them. To Shibam, Taizz, Al Mukallah, Sanaa, over the desert, by the sea and into the mountains. The shared taxis were always a half past dead Peugeot 405’s with sometimes 10 or 12 people jammed in.
The 92 pages of this book give my version of that unforgettable Ramadan month. An experience freely given to me by the generosity of Yemeni people.
©Max Pam

In combining black and white documentary photographs with handwritten journal entries, annotations, notes and other visual marks and ephemera, Pam creates an intimate journal of his life.
Each photograph is shaped by incidents experienced as a traveller, ‘His photographs extend upon the tradition of the gazetteer; each photograph a record of an experience, a personal account of an encounter somewhere in the world. Each glimpse is part of an unfolding story rather than simply a record of a place observed. While travel underscores his production Pam’s photographs are not the accidental evidence of a tourist.’
His latest book, or journal, Ramadan in Yemen — which is beautifully designed by Titus Nemeth — draws from a body of work made in 1993; a period marked by the countries first national election, and during what Pam describes as a ‘hot, spare and beautiful Ramadan May.’ Working exclusively in black and white, and with the square format, Pam exposed 60 rolls of medium-format film as he explored the country; translating his experiences into a series of images and diary entries.
The combination of image and Pam’s handwritten journal entries, offers and intimate and very personal document of a country — which had only seen the south and north unified three years earlier — at a critical juncture in its history. As he writes about his experiences, his own photographs and the architecture, the visual experience of Ramadan in Yemen comes to life, as his unique visual approach so often does.

Ramadan in Yemen is published by Éditions Bessard in an edition of 1000 numbered copies, each housed in a handmade clamshell box.©Wayne Ford