The 18th edition of Angkor Photo Festival 2023 is gearing up to take over Siem Reap from January 6 to 15. Here are the highlights.
The Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops started life in 2005 with the aim of providing an accessible educational and professional platform for the region’s emerging photography community.
Since then, it has grown to become Southeast Asia’s longest-running international photography event, welcoming Asian artists and those documenting the region to Cambodia annually – bar an online stint during Covid-19.
Angkor Photo Festival 2023
This year it is making a return in person, with preparations well underway across Temple Town to welcome photographers and other artists from across Southeast Asia. The jam-packed agenda takes in a series of workshops, exhibitions, tailored programmes and an art and book sale.
Angkor Photo Workshops
A staggering more than 200 applicants responded to the festival’s open call for participants to attend the workshops. A total of 15 from eight countries made the final cut and will be led by six tutors and facilitators to work on their proposed projects. They include French photographer and festival co-founder Antoine D’Agata, Mien-Thuy Tran from Vietnam and Katrin Koenning, who hails from Germany but lives in Melbourne.
Exhibitions
The festival will also feature six exhibitions comprising work by photographers from Myanmar, Cambodia and Swizz-Vietnam. This includes ‘By the Way’ by Cambodian photographer Narin Saobora and ‘Speaking in Silence’ by Cambodia’s Ny&Khun.
In addition, it brings the 2022 World Press Photo exhibition to Siem Reap’s USEA Campus from January 12 to 22. The world-famous exhibition showcases the best photojournalism and documentary photography from around the world. The 2022 edition saw 4,066 photographers from 130 countries enter 64,823 photographs.
9 Acts of Remembering
This curation of work by Fransisca Angela, of Indonesia, features eight Indonesian artists and how they use photography and film to reclaim shared stories within multicultural yet diverse societies.
Open Programme
Curated by Singaporean Jessica Lim and Farhana Satu from Bangladesh, this selection of work features 24 photographers from 17 nationalities. In addition to photographs, short documentaries will also be screened.
These include Sean Gallagher’s ‘Cambodia Burning’, which uses a blend of drone cinematography and Cambodian poetry to explore Cambodia’s changing landscapes caused by deforestation and forest fires, and the emotional impact it has had on Cambodian people.
Thomas Cristofoletti and Robin Narciso’s award-winning ‘The Last Breath of the Tonle Sap’ will also feature. It follows the hardships of a fishing family living on the edge of the Tonle Sap Lake as they battle the challenges decreasing water levels and fish stock have on their daily lives.
The festival this year takes place at Chocolate Garden, which will continue to host its weekend market throughout the festival. The fun kick-starts on January 6 with a special performance from Ny&Khun. This will be followed by the workshops before the public events resume on January 11.
