Framing the Khmer Rouge
Cambodia has long been presented to the world through the viewfinders of foreign photographers – but that’s slowly starting to change.
By
January 28, 2021
A worker is silhouetted as he pulls his fishing net at the flooded land following recent rain in Chres village on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, September 1, 2020.
Credit: AP Photo/Heng Sinith
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In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge have left deep and lasting scars on the land, the people, and the culture. The ultra-communist government killed nearly 2 million people between 1975 and 1979, including most of the country’s intellectuals and artists. As a result, those who initially documented these lasting effects were foreign photographers, but this has slowly begun to change, with Cambodian photographers producing increasingly singular work, often in spite of the lack of access to resources and formal education. How has this change come about? And why is it