A Change of Guard

សូមស្តាប់វិទ្យុសង្គ្រោះជាតិ Please read more Khmer news and listen to CNRP Radio at National Rescue Party. សូមស្តាប់វីទ្យុខ្មែរប៉ុស្តិ៍/Khmer Post Radio.
Follow Khmerization on Facebook/តាមដានខ្មែរូបនីយកម្មតាម Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/khmerization.khmerican

Wednesday 20 June 2012

A Battle, Primarily, Over Land in Cambodia

For more pictures, visit The New York Times.
 
For the past 11 years, the Magnum photographer John Vink has embedded himself on the front lines of Cambodia’s most intense modern-day conflict, a primordial battle over land in which the vulnerable poor, as always, are crushed by those with power.
As other photographers have come and gone, documenting the country’s beauty, violence and trauma, Mr. Vink has committed himself to this one place, and mostly to the story that has consumed him: evictions and land-grabbing.
He has spent much of that time at ground level, documenting the harsh lives of the country’s poorest people, covering, he says, at least 18 forced evictions, some of them violent, all of them devastating to people whose lives are tied to the land of their spirits and their forefathers.
“One goal stayed in my mind throughout,” he said in a telephone interview from Phnom Penh. “The mechanisms of an injustice hitting thousands of people in Cambodia had to be told. That’s what it is about.”
He has produced an intimate, passionate, almost palpable documentation of their lives — a decade of photographs, tens of thousands of images, the vast majority of which have never been published or exhibited.
He has become so immersed in his work, he said, that it has been hard to find a point at which to pause and pull it all together. “When living in a country instead of popping in and out, the flow of events is immersive,” he said. “You can’t escape it.”
Looking for a home for some of his 3,500 edited images, he has turned to the most modern of technology, creating an iPad app called Quest for Land, available through iTunes. In 20 themed chapters containing more than 700 photographs, he invites a viewer to join him in his immersion.
“With an iPad you have to cut down less,” he said. “If it were a book, I’d have to reduce it to 80 pages.” The sweep of this approach allows the material to be presented as a documentary rather than a collection of images. Still, an iPad app is only a start, Mr. Vink said. He is looking forward to creating exhibitions, a multimedia piece and “a book printed on real paper.”
DESCRIPTIONJohn Vink/Magnum Photos The first harvest by some of the 800 families at a controversial social land concession set up by General Pen Lim for destitute families in 2007. Saem, 2009.
His clearly-presented app is like a primer on the new technology, taking a viewer’s hand and leading the way through the text and photographs, accessible by taps and swipes, from one chapter to the next.
He has also recorded sound to accompany many of his images — street musicians, crowd noises, birds, frogs, roosters, people screaming during protests against the evictions. Some chapters carry the sounds of the demolitions as they happen, the shouts and pleas and squeak of crowbars and nails as the flimsy shelters of squatters or other villagers are ripped down in the view of the police.
The effect is to draw the viewer into the world that Mr. Vink has inhabited, creating an intimacy with his subjects as they struggle to survive, evicted into barren areas often without water or sanitation, and from which they are sometimes evicted again by people who covet the land.
“Land, soil, territory, borders, is what brings some of our most brutal animal instincts to the surface,” Mr. Vink writes in an introduction. “Packs of wolves chasing the weaker from a territory.”
He credits human rights groups for offering some resistance to the overwhelming pressure of greed, money and influence. Land evictions, these groups say, are the most pressing human rights issue today in a country that continues to suffer from political violence and official impunity.
The app includes an intelligent and thorough text written by the Phnom Penh-based journalist Robert Carmichael that enhances the images with context and analysis and that also amounts to a primer on modern-day Cambodia.
The text places the issue of land and land-grabbing firmly within the history and soul of a country that continues to feel the wounds of mass killings by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and of years of civil war that came before and afterwards.
“The landless peasants of 50 years ago,” Carmichael writes, “are mostly dead, as are most of those who oppressed them, but others have taken their place. The cycle of greed, of land loss and of despair is as relevant now as it ever was.”
DESCRIPTIONJohn Vink/Magnum Photos Settlers built a house in this former war-zone. Chran Bak, 2001.

Seth Mydans covers Southeast Asia for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.
Follow @vinkjohn and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.

No comments: