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.”
John 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.”
John 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.
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