A book could never hold all the images that John Vink amassed during 12 years of photographing evictions in Cambodia. Nor could a lorry contain the outrage.
Suspicious fires gutted some communities. At others, there was little left for guesswork – police came with torches and set the places alight. In a single week in November 2001, two large Phnom Penh neighbourhoods went up in smoke, displacing more than 2,500 families.
The worst was Sambok Chap, a half-dozen hectares of crumbling shanties otherwise situated on primo capital real estate.
“[Homeowners] took sledgehammers to demolish their homes of corrugated iron and wooden posts before the flames consumed them. They would need these materials to rebuild,” writes journalist Robert Carmichael in John Vink’s new iPad app, Quest for Land. “Soon sirens punched holes in the smoke-filled air as the men of Phnom Penh’s fire brigade arrived, sweating in donated jackets and bulky helmets, to aim jets of water from leaky hoses. They would focus on saving one house before moving rapidly onto another, the beneficiaries of a desperate bidding war between the better-off homeowners.”
And on it goes: 20 chapters, some 700 photographs and 20,000 words of more outrage.
Quest for Land, available on iTunes, represents more than a decade of work for Vink, a member of the prestigious agency Magnum Photos. The app delves into more than just evictions. In photography and prose, Vink and Carmichael explore the significance that land holds in Cambodian life, and the profound upheaval that is caused by losing it.
Born in Belgium in 1948, Vink moved permanently to Phnom Penh in 2000, and almost immediately set upon covering forced relocations – first in Poipet, where casino heavies were pushing the poor onto minefields, then in Phnom Penh, where those newly displaced families came seeking redress from a tin-eared government.
A working photo-journalist since the early1970s, Vink says the iPad not only represents a new medium to conquer, it offers a superior way to tell the story.
A book, he says, represents the quintessential way to complete a project, the “perfect balance between content and intention”. But with print publishing, there are always compromises to be made.
“The publisher has a say,” Vink explains. “He will say ‘No, I don’t want that cover, because it’s not commercial.’ He will say ‘Sorry, you want 180 pages? No way. It’s going to be 120, for economic reasons. You want paper that thick, no, sorry, cannot. It will be a soft cover.’ And you end up with a crappy little book.”
An app offers far greater creative control and far fewer constraints. “I feel much freer here than in a book. In a book, you really have restrictions because of the technique of printing. Here, the restrictions are the ability to programme; it definitely offers much more possibility than a book.”
Sound, video and slideshows all represent new media frontiers for the modern photographer. But ultimately, it is the plight of other humans that compels Vink to risk his safety for the sake of making pictures.
“Probably to do with my past, I guess, my childhood. I am not happy when I see injustice.”
WHO: John Vink, Magnum Photos
WHAT: Quest for Land, iPad app
WHEN: Now
WHERE: iTunes, johnvink.com/quest
WHY: Best app yet by a Magnum shooter