Photographer’s blog aims to chronicle the rebuilding of nation
Wed, 1 April 2015
Harriet Fitch Little
UK photographer Charles Fox has turned his pet project – collecting vintage Cambodian family photos – into a searchable archive that tells an intriguing social and historical story.

Fox started the original blog, Found Cambodian Family Portraits, just over a year ago, uploading a photograph each day with minimal captioning. He quickly garnered a healthy following mainly of researchers into Southeast Asia, fellow photographers and other Cambodia obsessives.

“The blog was a really useful way of starting the project, but it was never a fulfilling way of presenting the work,” Fox said this week. “There was this pressure to put pictures up, and I didn’t feel I was making the selections I wanted to make.”

Yesterday he launched a new website, Found Cambodia, which allows for a more curated presentation, with longer captions that explain the stories behind each image.

One important new feature of the website is that the time period has expanded to include pre-Khmer Rouge images. This, combined with the fact that photographs are now divided into time period, reveals a narrative of social and technological as viewers click through the images.

A 1973 photograph shows village children posing in the black uniforms of the Khmer Rouge, which the photographer’s owner told Fox were a coveted item of clothing for villagers long before they became obligatory. In 1982, it’s indoor sunglasses that mark sophistication, while in 1987 a whole family takes turns posing beside their new motorbike for portraits.