Few can ignore the metre-high images of men in tight-fitting dresses. They provoke giggles, questions and uncomfortable sideways stares.
If indifference is the enemy, Dareth Rosaline is winning. Her series of portraits along Sisowath Quay, part of the week-long Photo Phnom Penh festival, explores identity, sexuality and the cultural perceptions connected with appearance.
Other exhibits address weightier concerns. For the festival’s opening at the European Commission on December 7, giant images of Cambodian trees will cover the commission’s exterior wall on Norodom Boulevard, a not-so-subtle nod to the ecological necessity of greenery and, perhaps, the country’s inability to better protect its dwindling forest cover.
“I don’t care if people like it or not,” says Christian Caujolle, the festival’s curator. “If they are astonished, love, hate – that means they have seen something and that they have reacted.”
In all, more than 100 photographers from around the world will take part in 26 exhibits across 16 locations – not including the outdoor installations along the quay and other events, which all in account for more than 1,000 photographs. Disbelief settles over Caujolle as he assesses the scope of it all. “We are crazy,” he says.
Caujolle is no stranger to photography, or big ideas. After university, where he studied Spanish literature, he joined the left-wing newspaper Liberation, founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and others. He began covering art and photography in the mid-1970s and became the paper’s picture editor in 1981.
In those days, Paris had only one photography gallery: Agathe Gaillard. “I was going to that gallery every Saturday,” Caujolle told FK Magazine in August. “I was spending my afternoons there and I met Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Bill Brant, Ralph Gibson, Larry Clark, Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, Izis, Edouard Boubat.”
Caujolle began teaching photography at the French Cultural Centre in Phnom Penh in 1995, and many of today’s established and rising stars – Mak Remissa, Tang Chin Sothy, Kim Hak, Sovan Philong – came from his programme, Studio Image.
By the mid-2000s, Phnom Penh’s small but growing community of photographers needed an outlet to show their work. They longed for a platform to exchange ideas with shutterbugs from elsewhere. In 2008, the French Cultural Centre asked Caujolle if he could put something together. He didn’t hesitate. “The concept was immediately very clear for me,” he says.”The idea is one of exchange between Europe and Asia, with mostly young artists.”
This year’s festival presents an A-list of overseas talent. Michael Ackerman will make his first appearance in Asia, showing images from his next book at Java Café. French photographer and artist JR will create a Phnom Penh installation of his worldwide exhibit Inside Out, which comprises series of oversized black-and-white portraits hung in local communities. Isabel Munoz, the Spanish photographer known for her exquisite studies of the human form, will present a series on apsaras. Georges Ruosse, the space-bending anamorphic artist, is currently constructing images scheduled for unveiling on the wall of the French Embassy.
“If only a small minority of the Phnom Penhites will really grasp the subtleties of the proposed exhibitions, it will at least confront them with something unusual,” says John Vink, whose works on the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk will be presented on opening night.
The need to provoke runs deep through photography. But conversations cannot exist where knowledge of the form is absent. In Phnom Penh, as in most cities, educating a wider audience means getting images outside the galleries and into the street, where pictures can pose for everyday people. “We will not change the world with Photo Phnom Penh,” Caujolle says, “but the education purpose is part of the product.”
A natural teacher, Caujolle’s desire to share drives not only the festival’s outdoor agenda, but its commitment to keeping access free and open to all. The festival remains dedicated to the local public, he says, and while interaction between locals and foreigners is useful, it’s the exchange between countrymen that carries the greatest significance.
“There was a generation born around 1980, where in each field you find between one and five people who have that strong necessity of expression and who are talented and who have things to say. I am deeply moved by that,” Caujolle says. He hopes you will be too.
WHO: Cambodian and international photographers
WHAT: Photo Phnom Penh, international photo festival
WHERE: Across Phnom Penh (see institutfrancais-cambodge.com/ppp for details)
WHEN: December 7 – 12
WHY: World-class photography at your disposal