Cambodia | On Beauty & Beasts

I’m still digesting my last 10 days in Cambodia. It’s a country that inspires a special kind of love, sadness, and acute hatred for recent history. From Tuol Sleng prison and the killing fields of Choeung Ek to the ancient ruins of Beng Mealea and Angkor Wat and all the roads in between, it’s a place of vast contrast and beauty and terror. The nation’s past echoes loudly from the empty classrooms of S-21, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed from 1975-1979, as well as from the great carved corridors of Angkor Thom and the 900-year-old Bayon, with its army of passive stone faces forever looking out to some other distant horizon. There’s a kind of mysticism here that can only be borne out of history and tragedy. It’s a land of giants and harsh reverberations, of dusty countrysides and naked children and mass tourism to the temples outside of Siem Reap (but hardly anywhere else). These photographs are just tiny fragments. Snapshots really. The whole story would take so much longer.