Kerim's Triptych for Sunday October 27th, 2024

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Not every week has a "theme," but I do try to have one when I can. This week I present three photoessays, articles where the photographs are as important to the experience as the words.

1️⃣ Sihanoukville

Ivan Franceschini's essay, accompanied by Roun Ry's photographs, documents the rise and fall of the Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville. Today it is famous for its Chinese run scam phone call centers, where workers are trapped paying off their debt. The article traces the city's history back to the 1950s when it was home to a small Russian community, and documents how the arrival of Chinese gangs affected locals.

Alarm about public security in Sihanoukville peaked in May 2019 when security camera video showing the body of an assassinated Chinese man being thrown out of a car in broad daylight made the rounds on social media…. A couple of days later, Cambodia’s National Police released a report that revealed that Chinese nationals were the top perpetrators and victims of crime among foreigners in the kingdom during the first quarter of the year … Of 341 arrests, 241 were Chinese nationals.

Among growing public fear, later in the month, another video went viral. In it, a Chinese man wearing a white T-shirt was seen defiantly declaring: ‘If Sihanoukville will be safe or chaotic in the next three years is under my control’, while another 19, shirtless, Chinese men menacingly crowded behind him … The clip triggered strong feelings in the Cambodian population and further fuelled concerns about gangsters from China taking over the city. Rebuttals by the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh that this was just a prank by ordinary workers from Chongqing who had arrived in Cambodia only a few months earlier were met with scepticism…

2️⃣ Japanese clutter

Matt Alt's article on the secret history of Japanese clutter paints a useful counter-narrative to the myth of Japanese minimalism promoted by Marie Kondo. It shows that the myth of Japanese minimalism goes back to the first Western contact with japan. And it also explains the Japanese context in which Kondo and others like her emerged. Lee Chapman's wonderful photographs of a more messy and gritty Japan greatly enrich the article.

The fervour with which Japanese people consumed and discarded during the economic bubble was a testament to how wealthy the average citizen felt at the time. But when the bubble burst in 1990 and the economy stagnated, people began to re-evaluate their relationship with all the things they’d bought. They had surrounded themselves with stuff – and where had it got them? A reckoning was on the horizon, a grand decluttering. You’d be forgiven for thinking it a product of this particular moment in history. But herein lies another surprise: this wasn’t the first time Japan had come to grips with having too much stuff.

3️⃣ Summer Camp

Naomi Fry's New Yorker piece is different from the other two presented here, because it is actually an article about the photographs themselves. It is taken from the introduction to a book of photographs by Andy Sweet taken at a summer camp in 1977. Since I myself have traumatic memories of attending summer camps in the US in the late seventies, these photos really spoke to me.

Sweet’s pictures are a celebration of bravado but also of gawkiness: a sweetly pudgy girl on the verge of puberty, in pink shorts and a camp sweatshirt, grins shyly as she stands on a patch of grass with a taut bow and arrow in her hands; a skinny boy in a Speedo smiles uncertainly at the camera while clutching an El Diablo water ski on the banks of a lake, the prop serving to both double and conceal him; a bespectacled girl of perhaps thirteen poses on one knee at a tennis court, a racket in her hand, a scowl on her face, her T-shirt reading, unaccountably but perfectly, “SEXY.”

Endnote

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