Cambodian Photography | 30+ Years | Ian Taylor

I took up photography while living in Phnom Penh from 1994 thru 2000. I still go back as much as possible.

Documentary photographer also working as a family photographer in Hong Kong.

I arrived in Phnom Penh in August 1994, just after the United Nations had pulled out of the country. It was a completely wild, fascinating place to end up in those years, I can’t imagine there was a more interesting country in the entire world at the point.

I was the Business Manager at The Cambodia Daily newspaper, a scrappy tri-lingual A4 publication we printed six days a week. Sometimes there was no power for days. Sometimes politics got in the way of our work. It was an incredible team, many of whom went on to glittering careers in journalism: James Kanter, Gretchen Peters, Robin McDowell, Matt Lee, Chris Decherd being a few of them.

While I had spent five years working in the film industry, I was still an amateur photographer. Hanging out with the great photojournalists around time got me into photography and I was hooked.

While I left in 2000, I have mostly been living in Thailand since then, so I go back regularly. My main destination now is Battambang, which still feels like Cambodia to me. Phnom Penh feels sad, it had such great promise. Yes it was desperately poor and occasionally dangerous, but it was charming beyond belief. Not any longer. Must be a great place to be rich.

Here is a tiny sample of my Cambodia photos, I hope to get everything together at some point and put out a more organized offering. For those interested, I have an interesting video taken around my neighbourhood on St. 178 in January 1995. I have the only known video of the millions of bats leaving the roof of the National Museum of Cambodiaevery evening. It was just another surreal daily event in a place where they were common.