A Snapshot of the 'Photo Man'

[By Rebecca Yap - First published in ForgePress 21 November]

Clouds of dust settle back to the parched dirt road as the Jeep photographer Tim Smith is travelling in slows to a halt. Three trips, sponsored by the British Council, to Yemen – a country where paperwork is troublesome, security checks are tight and photography of women must be done in secret – taught Tim that rigid itineraries lead nowhere and that there are no fixed answers to questions about why they are stopping.

Now miles away from Yemen’s third largest city Ta’izz, a small crowd grows alongside the Jeep. Many Yemenis have come with arms outstretched, their wrinkled hands clutching yellowed British documents in the hope that "the white man from Britain" might be able to help them retrieve the pension they were entitled to during days of labour in Britain.

They have come to the wrong man. All Tim has is a stack of portrait shots of Yemenis he had taken as an example to other Yemenis who might volunteer to have theirs taken.

Among the crestfallen Yemenis, a man starts pointing at a picture and repeating excitedly: "That man is his father! That man is his father!" By sheer coincidence, the son of Fayed Ali Al-Ahmed, a man Tim photographed in Newport in 1984, recognised the picture of his father and agreed to take Tim to him once again. A few days later, Tim made a worthy trip back to Ta’izz where he met Fayed Ali Al-Ahmed and took his portrait for the second time; a moment in 2007 forever sealed in his memory.

Twenty-six years ago, Tim unwittingly began documenting the full-circle walk of British Yemenis – how they sailed from Yemen, settled for decades in Britain, but later went home to the Yemen they left behind. In pursuit of photojournalism ambitions, he studied photography at Gwent College in Newport, South Wales after completing a degree in Ecological Science at Edinburgh University. During his time there, he lived near the dock in a small cosmopolitan terrace named Dolphin Street.

"It was a multi-cultural street in every sense. There was no segregation," said Tim. Constantly taking pictures on the bustling street and in the nearby school, children dubbed him the "photo man". He later set up an exhibition based on the Dolphin Street project.

After graduation in 1984, Tim refused to join the rat race in London and later accepted an offer to work on a project about Sheffield’s steel industry. "The Don Valley was full of steelworks. You could smell it from afar," said Tim. It was while working on the Sheffield project that he first met British Yemenis who slogged in the steel factories shovelling coal, and he began photographing them.

Fast forward 20 years and the British Council had the idea of setting up an exhibition titled Muslims in Britain and sent six photographers to six Arabic countries. Tim was one of them and decided that since he had several encounters with Yemenis back in Sheffield that he would go to Yemen, thus sealing the connection between the years of work between Sheffield and Newport.
Yemen is a place where Arab hospitality is not an unfounded cliché. "It is an extraordinary place with the friendliest people. People who don’t have a great deal readily invite you into their houses to stay," muses Tim. "If you ever go to Yemen, I recommend you go in the mango season because the mangoes are fantastic.

"With the news on terrorism, the positive stuff gets forgotten. It is more dangerous to travel along the M62 to Manchester airport. Of course, be smart in answering if asked ‘What do you think of Tony Blair and George Bush?’" Tim joked. Yemen’s vibrant and colourful culture and history also inspired Tim to embrace more colour work over his usual black-and-white-styled images.

Yemen is one of the most cosmopolitan countries in the world. Thousands of years ago, Indian and Arab boats dominating the surrounding Red Sea and Indian Ocean that bordered Yemen made the country the trading hub between Arabia, Africa, the Mediterranean, India and the Far East. The port of Mokha, now a poor and dusty fishing town, was once heralded as the origin of coffee before unprotected relentless trade reduced the treasured resource to nothing more than a commodity.

In more recent history, Aden became the latest jewel in the British Empire which made use of the port to refuel coal-fired ships and as a short-cut from Britain to the rest of its vast eastern empire.

Yemeni men around Aden joined the Merchant Navy as sailors, eking out a living carrying out menial tasks below the deck and settled all over the world, laying the foundations of Britain’s longest-established Muslim community.

The Yemeni population in Sheffield settled in lowly-paid unskilled labour in steel factories. "Just wrestling with these huge amounts of molten steel all the time, it’s the hardest work I’ve ever seen anyone do," said Tim. Long hours earning money to send home to Yemen subjected them to a work-home-work routine, isolating them from interaction.

The Sheffield Yemeni population, who congregated in Attercliffe or "Little Aden" back in those days, had no pressure to learn English and their English vocabulary was largely limited to factory jargon. Then in the 1980s, economic depression and pressure from far-right parties in Britain led to escalated racial segregation and British Yemenis losing their jobs, triggering the flow of British Yemenis over to America or back to Yemen.

The remaining British Yemeni families have produced a younger generation of British Yemenis born and bred in Britain and adept in English, the language that separated their parents from the rest of British society.

On Sunday, October 19, a monochrome photograph projected on the plain white wall at the front of Activity Room Three in Sheffield’s Weston Park Museum draws attention to the image of cheap, back-breaking work done by a Yemeni man operating lifting gear at the Thomas Clarke and Sons foundry in the Don Valley, Sheffield back in 1984.

All around is the soft murmur of people. Mostly the visitors are older local people who have walked through Sheffield’s steely history and sporadic numbers of people with mixed Yemeni heritage, and the occasional aspiring young photographer. They have gathered for the exclusive world premiere of Tim’s latest and tenth book, Coal, Frankincense & Myrrh: Yemen and British Yemenis, a consolidation of his years of interaction with Yemenis.

Coal, Frankincense & Myrrh borrows its name from the integral role coal played in the lives of British Yemenis and the importance frankincense and myrrh had to trade in the then prosperous Yemen. The book looks at the lives of Yemeni sailors and their families with special attention to Sheffield Yemenis who are very much a part of the city both today and in its history.
Reader offer: To get a copy of Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh at the reduced price of £11 (plus £2.50 postage and packaging), send a cheque payable to Tim Smith to: Tim Smith, 5 Bankside Terrace, Shipley, West Yorkshire, BD17 7NF.