Photo Phnom Penh 2025: When Memory Crosses Contemporary Creation
- Partenaire Presse
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
The Cambodian Capital to the Rhythm of Photography
From November 19 to December 19, 2025, Phnom Penh is transforming. Between vibrant alleys and heritage sites, the city vibrates to the sound of shutters and is covered with multiple perspectives, brought together by the 16th edition of a now unmissable festival in Southeast Asia.
Born in 2008 at the initiative of the French Cultural Center—today the French Institute of Cambodia—Photo Phnom Penh has established itself as a true platform for dialogue between Europe and Asia, an innovative space where emerging artists, established photographers, and a curious public meet.
“The image here opens the door not only to memory but also to action and dream,” explains Christian Caujolle, co-founder of the festival. This edition, faithful to the spirit of exchange and discovery, unfolds under the theme of passage: between generations, territories, memory, and future.
A Program at the Crossroads of Worlds
Festivals, round tables, exhibitions, screenings, workshops, portfolio readings, and performances animate the city’s emblematic places for a month: the National Museum, the Bophana Center, the French Embassy, the House of Photography, the SraArt Gallery, and the famous Vann Molyvann house.
The event encourages the free circulation of ideas and people, bringing together about a hundred photographers from Cambodia, Vietnam, France, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
From the opening, the public is invited to actively participate thanks to the project “Photo is your memory,” which offers to scan, restore, and print family photographs collected in villages for free, thus creating a bridge between individual history and collective memory.
Tribute to Micheline Dullin: Phnom Penh of the 1960s
One of the highlights of this edition is the exceptional presentation of the work of Micheline Dullin, official photographer of King Norodom Sihanouk between 1958 and 1964, who immortalized the modernist momentum of a city in transition. Her photographs, exhibited at the National Museum for the first time, reveal Phnom Penh’s major construction sites—the Vann Molyvann Olympic Stadium, the Japanese bridge—as well as the intimate side, faces caught in the street, rural scenes bathed in sensual black and white.
Dullin, a rare female photographer of this era, is tenderly attached to conveying human presence, whether documenting or surprising it, offering a unique testimony on urban transformation and the spirit of a nation in search of modernity.
Between Tragedy and Rebirth: Living Memory Put to the Test of Time
2025 also marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. Photography here becomes a fundamental instrument of memory and transmission. A special evening of screenings brings together the moving works of Roland Neveu, the only Western photographer to have documented the fall of the capital, Philip Blenkinsop, chronicler of post-war Cambodia, Yukari Chikura, and Sylvie Lget, all questioning, each in their own way, the notions of archive, proof, and repair.
Kim Hak, born in Battambang shortly after the regime's fall, exhibits at the Bophana Center “Alive,” an exceptional memory work: each photograph stages an everyday object charged with family and national history, saved from exile, transmitted or buried, bearers of pain, redemption, and hope. This sensitive and universal project aims to do justice to survivors’ voices and to inscribe contemporary Cambodia into the grand history of diasporas and human resilience.
Mythologies and Beauties: Letizia Le Fur's Poetic Gaze
On the walls of the French Embassy, visitors discover “Mythologies,” Letizia Le Fur’s monumental fresco. Between reworked photography, painting, and reinvented color, her images invite entry into a sensitive universe where nature, omnipresent, offers itself as material to dream, think, and feel.
Borrowing from antique iconography and myth, Le Fur turns photography away from documentary intent to make it a poetic space, conducive to reflection on the present and the quest for beauty as a form of resistance to the trials of time.
Ecology on Alert: Laurence Bonvin’s Aletsch Negative
Still in a vein where the contemporary dialogues with current issues, Laurence Bonvin’s video installation “Aletsch Negative” transports the visitor to the heart of the largest glacier in the Alps, threatened with disappearance.
Made with limited means mixing experimental animation film and raw sound recordings, the work is approached as an immersive meditation on passing time, the fragility of nature, and the climate emergency characterizing our era.
Bonvin, a Swiss photographer and filmmaker, focuses her practice on marginal and changing territories and invites the Cambodian public here to rethink, through their own environmental challenges, the relationship between humans and their landscapes, between disappearance and memory.
Cambodia, Rivers, and Villages: Engaged Dialogues
The exhibition “Metis: Discovering the Links Between Humanity and the Ocean,” born from a call for projects by the French Development Agency, highlights the crossed perspectives of Khiev Kanel, Khun Vannak, and Sovan Philong. The trio immersed themselves in the daily life of an isolated fishing village in the south, at the Thai border.
Their approach, nurtured by workshops with children, creations, and restitutions on site, explores the vital attachment of inhabitants to the sea: the ocean as horizon, source of activities, survival issue, mirror of human and ecological fragilities.
Florent Meng Lechevallier, winner of the “Residences Route” program, digs into the question of the Mekong’s legal personality, a river crossing six nations but without a unified legal identity.
His photographs, oscillating between documentary and fiction, question how societies, cults, traditions, and modernities coexist, sometimes clash, always intertwine on the banks of the great river.
Portraits of Contemporary Cambodia
The SraArt Gallery presents, in a collective exhibition, a rich portrait of today’s Cambodia, mixing local and international artists. Temples, pagodas, artisanal know-how, villages, and landscapes compose a mosaic of perspectives bearing witness to the richness of national cultural and spiritual heritage, as well as recent transformations. Light sculptors dialogue with the street, nature with the urban, the ordinary with the marvelous.
The Vann Molyvann house, an architectural jewel of the 1960s, reinvents itself this year as a community and artistic innovation hub: café, archive space, library, event stage around art and construction offer a new setting for transmitting architectural knowledge and the creative vitality of Cambodian youth.
An Opening to the International and Regional Renewal
For the first time, Photo Phnom Penh dialogues with the Photo Hano festival from Vietnam. The images of Thanh Hue, a young engaged photojournalist now based in Ho Chi Minh City, plunge the viewer into the intimacy of old Hanoi—its alleys, lakes, children’s games, signs of continuity and transition in public and private spaces.
This crossed perspective, also involving the VII Academy, recalls the transnational dimension of the artistic project and contemporary documentary photography.
Creation, Meeting, and Transmission: Honoring Youth
The Studio Images, Cambodia’s first photography school, opened its doors only recently and already its students exhibit within the festival framework, asserting a new desire for professionalization, speech, and local creation.
Workshops, portfolio readings, screenings, open-air concerts, workshops for young and old, tuk-tuk photo-guided tours... the festival embeds itself in the city, life, and future.
Photo Phnom Penh 2025 thus aims to weave, through photography, a living memory, a fruitful dialogue between generations, territories, styles, paying tribute to the richness of a past and the creative energy of a present resolutely turned toward tomorrow. Whether amateur, connoisseur, simple curious, or visual world actor, this festival offers everyone the joy of exploring and sharing, in a camera-capital, a thousand and one faces of Cambodia and the world.
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