The Temples of Angkor

I spent that night in a traditional Cambodian hut, listening to rain on the roof while insects worried the candlelight. As I entered the village, I was welcomed by the chief – taller than most, composed and unmistakably authoritative – who had served as a general in the resistance to Pol Pot. Dinner included fried tarantula, freshly caught that afternoon – one of the foods that years of war and hunger had made part of Cambodian life. Before I had even seen the temple, Cambodia’s ancient and modern histories were already pressing against one another.

I had come to Cambodia to photograph Angkor and the remoter Khmer temples beyond it. But the month became as much an encounter with Cambodia itself as a photographic project. The country was already changing fast. Tourism was expanding. Roads around major centres such as Phnom Penh and Siem Reap were improving, and places that had once taken real effort to reach were becoming steadily more accessible. Yet much of the older difficulty still remained. In the rainy season, journeys could still be wrecked by floodwater and mud; distance still had physical force.

Many days began before dawn in a tuk-tuk leaving Siem Reap in darkness, trying to arrive before the tourist day began. Heat built quickly after sunrise. Humidity turned clothes, camera straps and skin damp almost at once. Roads dissolved into standing water and long delays. And beyond the roads lay another kind of constraint: a countryside still marked by war. In rural Cambodia, unexploded ordnance and other remnants of conflict meant that moving casually off established routes could be dangerous. Even where the landscape appeared lush and empty, it still had to be read with caution.

My fascination with Cambodia had begun much earlier, in childhood encounters with its archaeological history in magazines such as National Geographic. Angkor Wat seemed almost implausible: galleries, towers and carvings emerging from jungle on a scale that defied belief. Henri Mouhot, the French naturalist whose journals helped bring Angkor to wider European attention after his visit in 1860, gave classic expression to that astonishment when he described one temple as “a rival to that of Solomon” and the work of “some ancient Michael Angelo”. But Angkor Wat was never the whole subject. I was equally drawn to Beng Mealea, Koh Ker and other remoter sites, where the jungle pressed harder against the stone and where the labour of getting there changed the act of seeing.

These were not monuments encountered without effort. They had to be worked towards – through flooded roads, overnight stays, punishing heat and the steady friction of the landscape itself. At the farther temples there were long stretches when I was almost entirely alone, with only insects, wet stone and dense vegetation pressing in around the ruins. What gave those places their force was not simply their beauty, but the conditions of arrival: the sense that Cambodia was already opening to the world, yet still bore the practical hardships and buried dangers of its recent past.

That is what these photographs try to hold on to: not a fantasy of untouched ruin, but a particular moment in the experience of reaching these places. They belong to a Cambodia already in rapid transition, yet still difficult enough that remoteness, effort and risk remained part of what the temples meant.

Text and images copyright © Thaddeus Pope. All rights reserved. No unauthorised use, reproduction, distribution, or publication without prior written permission.