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Cambodia

Imagine the sight of cold chocolate milk paired with the smell of kerosene. Imagine that mixture as the water around your home, your streets, your playground. In Kampong Phluk, life is balanced on stilts above it, ferried silently through it, or gathered restlessly upon it. I entered as a passenger with no language, no map, only observation. A silent oarsman pulled me into the forest where daylight broke in fragments. A woman sat in her boat, resting from a task I could not name. And a floating square of boats revealed itself, a community suspended on water that concealed more than it gave away. These photographs are fragments of that passage — moments when life unfolded as if in plain view, yet remained unknowable.

KAMPONG PHLUK

The Passage

Unable to ask questions, I stepped obediently onto the flat boat where the oarsman waited. He didn’t meet my eye, barely nodded, and with long, slow strokes began negotiating our way through the drowned forest. I don't think I ever even saw his face.

Time fell away; there was no sense of how far or how long, only the gentle slushing of water against wood. My silent guide seemed absorbed in an eternal task — as if ferrying me across some unseen threshold. Was I being crossed over, and to where? The thought lingered, until another surfaced: there might be crocodiles in these waters.

Woman at Rest

The Floating Village

Cambodia, Kampong Phluk. Life flows with the water in this stilted world, where boats serve as markets, kitchens, and doorsteps. Women trade, children play, and the trees rise from the flood, their roots lost beneath the tide. In the dry season, the land reappears—but for now, the village drifts, a world suspended between river and sky.

The Floating Village
Life flows with the water in this stilted world, where boats serve as markets, kitchens, and doorsteps. Women trade, children play, and the trees rise from the flood, their roots lost beneath the tide. In the dry season, the land reappears—but for now, the village drifts, a world suspended between river and sky.