Phnom Penh People

It was in 1866 that pioneering photographer John Thomson, who travelled much of the Far East between 1862 - 72, visited Cambodia . First photographing Angkor Wat and then the royal family in Phnom Penh, which then, although being named in the same year as the countries new capital, was little more than a riverside road and floating village along the west bank of the Tonle Sap (River Sap). Urbanization transpired slowly, but with it's city canal construction, colonial public buildings, port and road infrastructure, Phnom Penh was known during the early decades of the twentieth century as the little Venice of the East. The canals have since been filled in, but many of the colonial buildings still stand. It wasn't until the 1960s that the major development of Phnom Penh began.

Since the mid 1800s documentary photographers have been capturing images that inform. In 1878 John Thomson published the first photographically illustrated work to focus on social issues, the work entitled Street Life In London, highlighted the day to day life of the London poor and the resilience with which they made a living. Less than a hundred years ago Lewis W Hine photographed children at work in the tenements of New York City. A little more than sixty years ago Robert Capa photographed the refugees of Madrid, Walker Evans documented the working poor of Havana, Dorothea Lange followed the impoverished share croppers of the American south and Bill Brandt indelibly recorded the lives of wartime Londoners. The people of Phnom Penh, by comparison, have been little photographed. If nothing else, they are known for their unprompted smiles, but for decades they have been a people living in extremis: trapped in a Dickensian commercial matrix, harassed by anxiety, haunted by ghosts. They may tell you the war was a long time ago, they may not wish to remember, but anyone with eyes to see can see that their main concern is getting by, making ends meet, making it to the next day.

The bad times are past, they are waiting for the good times to get better. Caught by the incessant daily grind, in which enough sometimes seems unattainable, the common people have nothing but laughter to put between themselves and the street. You, the fortunate visitor, hear them call to you from the noon-day shade or from beneath a faded awning in the monsoon rains. Walking along, startled by novel and indescribable sights and sounds, by the notational fullness that presents itself to your eyes, you come upon a sight of extraordinary strangeness, power, perfection: a gibbon chained to a car roof, a hearse dressed up in white bunting, an old man selling bulls horns from a bicycle; a monk smoking a cigarette under an umbrella; a cooking fire blazing on the balcony of an art deco villa; a woman hanging laundry out to dry over a railway track; a snake oil salesman and his dwarf assistant; a troupe of boys flying a tattered, plastic kite. You reach for your camera, but the moment passes. How many times a day does this happen? ,no matter, there will soon be another. Such moments are nothing more than life for the people of Phnom Penh - just as they were for the people of London, the children of Harlem and the refugees of Madrid - as they are for the families of Kabul, Bogota, Buenos Aires and Freetown today. They are not the same people, but they are living the same lives. They are working, they are trying to get by.

 

Product Details

• ISBN: 0211100050073
• Publisher: Eight Ball Publications
• Binding: Hardback
• Languages: English
• Pages: 153
• Dimension (w x h): 21.50 cm x 27.50 cm
• Weight: 9.80 kg 

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