Sovan Philong: photography caught in the headlights

Motor's Light ... one of the night views by limited light taken by Cambodian photographer Sovan Philong

Sovan Philong (Photo: The Phnom Penh Post)

Cambodian photographer's unusual light sources highlight his subjects' unusual expressions

Tuesday 27 December 2011
Bruno Philip
Guardian Weekly

Sovan Philong, 25, is a Cambodian photographer who uses light from strange sources – laptop or motorbike headlights – to reveal unusual aspects about people, places or situations. He tracks down his subjects in the night, placing wandering souls in, literally, quite a new light. "The idea came to me when I realised that here in Cambodia some people spend their time glued to their computers, whereas most peasants have never even seen one. I wanted to see how people in the countryside reacted when they looked at my laptop screen, although I've also photographed students and professors."

Sovan says the sudden light from the screen gives the subject "a different kind of expression," which justifies his unusual habit of brandishing a computer before strangers. "Sometimes I read fear in their pale faces. Others don't dare say a word until I've finished." Despite his gentle face and smooth voice, he doesn't seem to give them much of a choice.

The technique is the same when he uses his motorbike headlights.

"I don't like taking pictures of temples, palaces and all those traditional things," he said. He prefers driving around rice paddies and forests at dusk or dawn, or even in the dead of night. He explains to his subjects that he is going to take their picture, sets up his tripod and twists the throttle grip on his bike with one hand to boost the battery and brighten the light.

"I like taking people in that narrow beam of light," he said. His subjects are like prey caught in the headlights, both fascinated and blinded.

Sovan began his career on a daily paper, The Phnom Penh Post, and now works as a photographer for the Chinese press agency Xinhua. But photojournalism does not really interest him, and he claims to be frustrated by the "ephemeral, rather shallow" aspect of press photography, which "ends up in the archives". This seems a surprising attitude for a man who lives in a Buddhist universe marked by transience and by the transmigration of souls.

However, Sovan is of Sino-Vietnamese origin and was raised as a Catholic. He discovered his photographic vocation through a Catholic NGO when he attended a photography workshop five years ago. His first shots were of people living in an old Phnom Penh church that had been deconsecrated under the Khmer Rouge.

The 2009 PhotoPhnomPenh (PPP) festival organised by Christian Caujolle, founder of the Vu agency and formerly in charge of photography at the French daily paper Libération, gave Sovan a career boost by exhibiting his work. Last month, for the fourth exhibition organised by the Institut Français in Cambodia, his reputation improved again.

Now he is exhibiting works by six of his "disciples" (he has become a guru for fellow photographers) beside pictures by 12 young Cambodians he has also taught. These are important endorsements from an unusual artist, who in 2006 thought that photography was "a job for idiots" and was just a matter of "pressing a button".

Sovan was born in a rice paddy area 80km south-east of Phnom Penh, in 1986. He hardly remembers his father. "There wasn't much money in fishing so my father used to go into the jungle to hunt monkeys. One day when I was three, he left for the forest with two friends and we never saw them again. We never found their bodies."

What happened? "The Khmer Rouge," said Sovan.

Nobody escapes from these memories in Cambodia. Sovan's father disappeared in 1989, a decade after the Pol Pot regime fell, but former regime supporters had become guerrillas, living in the forests and still violent. "One day I woke up thinking, what if history repeated itself? What would we do if such a regime got into power again?"

As a reporter he has witnessed violent clashes between protesting peasants and police and realised how history happens. "I've seen peasants in violent fights with police, cudgel to cudgel. And later I've seen them sitting around a table chatting. The police were from the same district. So I thought if they were hitting so violently it was because they were obeying orders. Just like the petty Khmer Rouge cadres in Pol Pot's time."

This article originally appeared in Le Monde