IN SANA’A, the capital of Yemen, groups of women and children gather at public fountains in town squares every morning. They fill plastic canisters with water, then transport them home on pushcarts. The fountains are currently the only source of potable water for most residents of Sana’a, where only 20 percent of households receive piped water. The city, perched in the mountains in Yemen’s west, is among the areas worst affected by a water shortage that plagues the entire country. Sana’a’s water table stood at just 30 metres below the ground in the 1970s; today, it has dropped to almost 1,200 metres in some areas, and the streams and aquifers feeding the city continue to dry up.
Among the causes of Yemen’s looming water crisis are rapid urban development, the unregulated drilling of wells, and the cultivation of khat—a lucrative shrub whose leaves are widely consumed as a stimulant, and which has dominated local agriculture for the last decade. Almost 90 percent of the country’s water is used for small-scale farming, and about half of that for cultivating khat. To add to the pressure, Yemen’s population, the poorest in the Arabian peninsula, is expected to double to almost 48 million people by 2035.
Matilde Gattoni’s richly detailed photographs of Yemen’s capital and countryside capture this stark reality. The relentless sun—a recurring visual theme in the Italian photographer’s previous work from West Asia—beats down on people both at work and at leisure, though mostly the former. Gattoni’s subjects bear heavy canisters, travel along desolate roads carrying bags, and toil to grow and harvest khat. Even among those at rest—a group of men smoking hookahs on a rooftop, or a man sitting on a riverbed beside his scythe—there is a sense that life in this environment is devoid of much comfort.
Gattoni began taking photographs while at university in France. In September 2000 she took a vacation to Israel, and found herself a witness to the start of the Second Intifada, which took the lives of an estimated three thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis. Gattoni began photographing the turmoil around her, and managed to sell her first pictures to an Italian magazine. Since then she has worked all over the planet, and on a broad array of issues. On a trip to Uzbekistan in 2001, she saw and documented the devastation caused by the drying of the Aral Sea. Since then, she said, working on water crises has “become a long-term project for me.” Gattoni puts in months of research before embarking on new work. “I usually identify in advance the places and people that are most affected by the plight,” she said. Then, she insists on finding “a good fixer, someone who knows the area, the culture, the language. The fixer is essential.”
Gattoni was invited to shoot in Yemen by an acquaintance in 2012. She worked undercover, in breach of strict restrictions on the work of journalists. In the last days of her three-week trip, she was reported to the police by a government spy, and detained for several hours before being allowed to go. Her photographs defy the Yemeni government’s efforts to hide the scale of the country’s challenges. The harsh truth is that, without drastic changes to policy and strict agricultural regulation, Sana’a risks running out of water completely within the next decade. Many in Yemen have already given up on finding a sustainable solution, and have proposed the drastic step of abandoning the city for a new capital.