Phnom Penh (Cambodia), 09/04/2009. Co-founders of Stiev Selepak (Art Rebels) in front of Sa Sa gallery. ©Vandy Rattana
“For Cambodians, photography that is other than what is directly useful, like family pictures, does not exist”, says Chan Vitharin, who works at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. “Sometimes, my family still ask me to take pictures for great occasions like weddings or births”, says Mak Remissa, one of the rare Cambodian photographers who is represented in international news agencies. “They do not understand the reality of my work.” And indeed, snapshots of Cambodia circulating around the world are most of the time the deed of Westerners who then show them in their own countries, in museums or in the media.
In Cambodia, History happens right in front of you and everything is history, according to John Vink , a photojournalist affiliated to the Magnum agency who fell in love with the country twenty years ago. “On top of that, it is so easy to take pictures here, anything goes and you can go all places and meet whoever you want to meet, ranging from the poorest to government tycoons. For a European person who has some equipment, it is really easy to do a good job.” But until today, almost nobody has mentioned pictures taken by Cambodians.
History of photography in Cambodia: the tedious unwinding of a film
Today, a new generation of photographers might well be emerging, but not long ago, Cambodian photography was all about a few names, out of which some managed to find their way on the international stage. Cambodia’s tragic and eventful history brought the first fruits of photography down as they were trying to emerge. Nevertheless, there is previous history when it comes to photographs even though it is difficult to trace back. “We have a lot of archives, photographs taken during the French protectorate, when Cambodia became independent and during the Khmer Rouge regime, but very few come from national photographers”, says Gaetan Crespel, in charge of the archives department at the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre . “We are in tough with one of them, called Van Im. He covered the civil war in the 1970s on the side of Lon Nol. We would like to know more about the way he learnt photography. But like many, he does not wish to talk about that time. He is now a photographer in California.”
Tracking down Cambodian photographers seems like a tough task, given the fact that even in the 1960s, the existing newspapers or magazines like Cambodge Nouveau or the daily paper Neutralité only displayed illustrations that were drawings or, when they did have pictures, the name of the authors did not appear. As for the Khmer Rouge period, it is only some fifteen Cambodian photographers who were captured on film thanks to the work of Tim Page , a British photojournalist who collected the works of those photojournalists in a book entitled Requiem. It is dedicated to these photographers who died in Indochina and Vietnam. “Many of them worked in news agencies, as Mak Remissa recalls, but most of them worked in the army and did not survive the war.
1990s: the process is initiated
Photography made in Cambodia really started to emerge in the 1990s with the help of expatriates and Westerners passing through the country who decided to share their knowledge with students interested in arts. Thierry Diwo was one of the first protagonists who set out to do such work: “I arrived in 1992 and in 1993, with the help of a friend, a painter, we founded the association Arts Cambodge thanks to the support of sponsors like the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with a view to save the Faculty of Fine Arts”, the photographer, who specialises on portraits, recalls. “Back then, there was nothing, not even a book or a laboratory and very few Khmers spoke English or French. In order to select my students, I asked them to bring a picture they liked, even if there were not many in the country. I saw pictures from newspapers in black and white, since colour had not come here yet. I provided the cameras, films and the morning soup. After three years, Chan Vitharin took over my position and afterwards Mak Remissa joined him. Both of them attended my classes and were only twenty-something.” And efforts paid off: a few years on, several of those students have managed to become known and are selling their pictures worldwide via news agencies.
“I remember how hard it was for me to understand how to take a picture”, Mak Remissa acknowledges. The photographer, now 41, tells us that he learnt the technical aspect of photography at the Faculty, but needed to learn how to work on a particular topic. When the former daily newspaper Cambodge Soir and the bimonthly paper Le Mekong asked me for pictures, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Back then, on top of that, those papers did not have their own photographers. Journalists themselves were in charge of photography. So I asked for advice from foreign photographer and signed up for all sorts of photography classes. And then Reuters asked me to work for them, but I refused since I spoke very little English and knew nothing about computing. So, they paid for classes for me in Thailand and when I came back, I was ready, I had understood.” From Thierry Diwo to John Vink without forgetting the French Cultural Centre , many are the foreign references quoted by photographers from that period of time. But today, it seems that the new generation is trying to stand out from the western pattern. Far from denying such assertion, these new photographers keep seizing numerous opportunities to learn with professionals from the western world, not any more with the goal of learning photography but that of finding an identity of their own.
Still some help, but…
The coming of the digital age, the development of computers and the Internet and the spreading of the English language facilitate the emergence of new talented artists in the field of photography today. Foreigners are still an essential source of help for Khmer photographers but the initiatives started in 2000 now prove that Cambodian photography is indeed getting over this.
For example, the Popil photography gallery, founded in 2005 by French photographer Stéphane Janin who was one of the first to put up exhibits to show the work of Cambodian photographers but above all, to make them work together in workshops that were also open to the world of arts, when photo-reporting was the dominating trend. Also, the work of Maria Stott, a 32 year-old Polish woman who has been collecting the works of some thirty Cambodian professional photographers and amateurs since 2008 at the On Photography Cambodia (OPC) . Her project, supported by the UNESCO consists in representing the Building, an emblematic structure in the history of Phnom Penh erected in the 1960s and soon doomed to destruction, through its evolution in time. “That work is made in Cambodia by Cambodians and for Cambodians. It is time we put an end to the domination of Westerners in the field of photography. The project aims at revealing Khmer photographic identity and make sure it functions by itself.”
But the reality is that Khmer photography is still quite absent on the international scene. Indeed, photographers from the country are barely represented at the annual Angkor festival, the original goal of which was to promote Asian photography. Phnom Penh Photo, a festival organised for the first time in December 2008 by the French Cultural Centre, presented the works of a few local artists. “It is true that there were few of them”, says FCC director Alain Arnaudet, “But at the same time, we wanted the festival to be quality, with recognised international artists, and we wanted to present what was best in Cambodian photography. The point was also to make photography come to Phnom Penh and show it to Cambodians.”
Tomorrow: independence?
The young generation of Cambodian photographers seems determined to take their destiny into their own hands. Indeed, a good example of that is the initiative launched by the Art Rebels group of artists (Stiev Selepak in Khmer), who opened the first Cambodian photography gallery, “Sa Sa”, on March 21st this year. For Vandy Rattana, a 29 year-old photojournalist, “Our group was born in the workshops organised by Stéphane Janin who taught us a lot, like all those foreign photographers who come here too, but it is time to stick out from that example. We opened the gallery in order to open up Khmer mindsets to photography, a world which they know nothing about. We also wish to make other youngsters want to become photographers. For that matter, everyone is welcome to come and put up an exhibit here.” The gallery currently displays the works of Khvay Samnang, 27, which consists in a series of close-up portraits which undoubtedly reminds one of those taken by the Khmer Rouge and now displayed in the former S-21 detention centre. This time, the protagonists are not adults but children photographed passport-style, which might be a way of showing that the worst lies behind that.
“For me, those young ones have got the point”, says John Vink. “In my opinion, it is not schools or acquiring academic knowledge they need, but rather gathering together, create emulation, show their work and invite professional photographers passing through here to share their knowledge with them. This is how they will form an identity of their own. And then, nothing is over yet since the market of photography is saturated, this is a fact and the case everywhere. But that type of initiative is necessary, for art, whatever shape it comes in, not to become fossilised in Cambodia.”
* The Bophana Centre urges all those who know anything about pre-1970 Cambodian photographers and photography to contact them: +855 (0)23 992 174. Address: 64 Street 200, Phnom Penh
Photographer: a man’s thing?
Tough thing it is to find female photographers among young Cambodian talented artists. There are a few of them, like Moniroth Chiart Chan, who is now expecting her third child. “At the beginning, I only took pictures of my children”, she remembers. “Then, I was lucky enough to be singled out by photographer John Griffith who invited me to take part in a photo workshop at the 2006 Angkor Festival. It was very hard because I was not used to building up a topic and was not expecting so much work but my teachers like Antoine d’Agatha, were really good. He asked me what I usually photographed and I answered “my children”. He asked me “Why do you not do it now?” So I chose a little girl in the street, she was selling postcards, and I dressed her up and photographed her as the transformation was operating, until she looked like a princess. I called this work Cinderella.” However, her case is very rare. “Cambodians think this is not a job for girls. It is true that it’s difficult, I have to move around a lot, have yourself accepted in the places you go to, carry the equipment… Even when they take an interest in it, Cambodians girls feel disheartened very quickly.” Today, even if she does not wish to make a profession of it, Chiart continues to work on photography.
Reads
- Requiem, By The Photographers Who Died In Vietnam and Indochina (Published by Random House, 336 pages). By Tim Page, in collaboration with Horst Faast. This well-documented portfolio is dedicated to the 135 international combat photographers who died or went missing as they were covering the Indochina and Vietnam wars.
- Passeport pour l'image, a small catalogue in the shape of a compendium, published by the Phnom Penh French Cultural Centre (FCC). It was presented on the occasion of the exhibition of photographs made by the FCC Photo Lab students. Flick through it, to have an idea about Cambodian photographers and their work at the end of the 1990s. At least 5 students presented in the book were employed in news bodies. In French.
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