Quickly before my plane for Myanmar leaves tonight… The CNRP (Cambodian National Rescue Party), a fusion between the ‘Sam Rainsy Party’ and the ‘Human Rights Party’, staged a fairly successfull demonstration on ‘Democracy Square’, gathering some 2000 militants to request a ‘reset’ of the voters’s list ahead of the coming general elections in July. The CNRP thinks the lists are rigged…
’30 Years for a Trial’ is both a report on the trial of Duch, the infamous director of S21, a Khmer Rouge interrogation centre where 15,000 people were tortured and killed, and a reflection on the difficulty of photographing the Cambodian genocide. With texts by Robert Carmichael, over 170 photographs by John Vink and a multimedia presentation, it gives some graphical insight and background information on what may well be the only Khmer Rouge to be sentenced by the ECCC.
’30 Years for a Trial’, an e-book for the iPad is available for 5.99$ on iTunes at THIS LINK.
So Chechenia is in the news… The U.S. news that is. Back in the late ’90’s they suffered a brutal repression by the Russians and were in the news there for quite a while.
Here is a very small insight of what some of them went through: Chechen refugees in the Pankisi valley of neighbouring Georgia…
More on my website here.
The Khmer New year holidays are over, Tep Vanny, the Community Representative who was awarded the Global Leadership Award by the Vital Voices Foundation in Washington is back in Phnom Penh… So it is back to square one on the Boeung Kak Lake issue. The community felt misquoted by the (departing) Governor of Phnom Penh and wanted to stress to Prime Minister Hun Sen the fact that they do not belong to a particular political party. A strong police force (also back from holidays) more or less managed to stop them at 150 meters from the Prime Minister’s Phnom Penh residence…
The full Boeung Kak Lake story can be found here and here, or in ‘Quest for Land’, the app for the iPad available on iTunes here.
‘Royal Silence’ is an e-book for the iPad with 185 photographs by John Vink about King Norodom Sihanouk’s passing away in October last year, marking the end of an era for the Cambodians. It contains photographs of the King upon his return from exile in 1991, as well as from the massive crowds grieving the monarch when his body was returned from Beijing and from the cremation ceremonies 100 days later. The e-book also contains a text by Phnom Penh based journalist Abby Seiff and a poem by Pierre Gillette, former Chief Editor of the ‘Cambodge Soir’ daily.
‘Royal Silence’ is available for 3.99$ on iTunes at the following link…
‘Same Same’ is an e-book, exclusively for the iPad, with a set of paired photographs, taken at least 10 years apart. A reflection on predestination in photography.
It is available on iTunes at this link.
Cambodia and Thailand were (yet again) at war back in 2008 for a territorial dispute… Soldiers on both sides died for a piece of land of 4,7Km2. But it is not just about the land. The stunning Preah Vihear temple, dating from the 10th and 11th century and with a distinct Angkorian architecture, is perched on a 500m high cliff there. It is one of the absolute symbols of Cambodia. See more photographs here…
This week the International Court of Justice in The Hague holds a hearing for both the Cambodian and Thai to determine, hopefully once and for all, on which side of the border the temple is located.
Three nights and four days in Singapore on a family holiday: long hours walking on sidewalks without obstacles, zapping along on an smooth public transportation system, going from one attraction to another and lava-hot credit cards. Singapore is impressively efficient.
All the pictures are taken with the Fuji X100S… The lens doesn’t have the sharpness of a 35mm Summicron, but at least this camera might be the first viable alternative to a Leica M9…
