Farmer
Digital Photograph with ink and markers. 16 x20. 2015
On the way to a Buddhist cave site, we walked past a lush green field. As I turned to photograph, I saw a man squatting at the end of these rows of vegetation.
Initially, I wondered about what he thought about a group of western students passing by his quiet pasture. For sure had he had lived through this period of genocide and upheaval. What happened to him? What did he do during this time?
As I reworked this image, I thought about the abundance of life before me, growing from the ground, but as I looked more, I started to see the harrowed ground as ditches. The Khmer Rouge wanted a return to agrarian culture, but also used those same farming tools to mass murder. Bones and clothing were still visible in the ground when we visited the Killing Fields.