Image:Khmer Times

Peter Olszewski
2 august 2019

“I don’t do art,” says photo-journalist George Nickels, despite his photos appearing in several international exhibitions where his stark documentary-style photography has been critiqued as imbued with artistic sensibility

“I remember a 12-year-old girl who had been left to care for a nine-month-old baby for months. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who beat her and her mother, and he was rarely on the lake. Her mother could not handle the beatings so she chose to leave her baby with her 12-year-old little girl to seek work as a prostitute in Siem Reap. I feel obliged to document these situations and bring light onto an otherwise shadowed world.”

“On another occasion a formerly trafficked and enslaved fisherman told me that when he got tired, they gave him a powder to dissolve in water and drink. ‘I threw it away the first time they gave it to me and the second time, but when they saw I hadn’t taken it the third time, they beat me,’ the man said. ‘I knew if I didn’t take the powder, they’d kill me. I don’t know what it was, but when I took it, my energy came back and I didn’t need to eat any rice’.”

“Stories of murder and mock executions whilst men are enslaved on Thai fishing vessels. Stories of the broken families that are left behind with no idea of where their loved ones are or whether they will ever be reunited again, and the post-traumatic stress that affects virtually every formerly trafficked and enslaved man or woman.

Full https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50629816/b ... k-reality/