Shooting in the Dark

When he arrived in Phnom Penh in August 1973, Roland Neveu was 23 years old and barely experienced enough to call himself a photographer. He stayed seven weeks until he ran out of money, but that was long enough to get hooked. Cambodia—its war, its people, its tragedy—became an obsession. After a year of mandatory military service back home in France, he returned to Cambodia in 1975, just as the Khmer Rouge swept to power and plunged the country into the abyss. For the next 25 years Neveu would return to photograph whenever he could.

What is it about Cambodia that renders it so irresistible to writers and photographers? Are we beguiled by the gentleness of the people? Or by the enigma of why a country once famed for its lotus-eaters should be so bedeviled by war and suffering, much of it self-inflicted? Whatever the root of Neveu's obsession, we all benefit from his pictures, which are powerfully displayed in Cambodia: The Years of Turmoil (Asia Horizons; 160 pages).

Those of us who worked in Cambodia in the early 1970s as the noose tightened around Phnom Penh knew little of the Khmer Rouge. They were not like the North Vietnamese communists who held press receptions in Paris. When a few of our colleagues ventured into the forest on the promise of friendly contact with the Khmer Rouge, they never returned.

Neveu was one of the few Western journalists who stayed behind as Phnom Penh fell. It's a revelation to look into the faces of these Khmer Rouge soldiers as they secured the broad boulevards of the capital and confiscated the weapons of the defeated army. Some are the faces of peasant children. Others, classically Khmer, are weathered and determined, like the busts on the walls of Angkor Wat. The body language of a few, clearly the bosses, is menacing. No need to read the captions: the atmosphere in these pictures portends the forced evacuation of the city and the beginning of the Cambodian holocaust.

The agony never seems to really end. No matter when Neveu returns—1981, 1985, 1990—the visages he captures so expertly are still gaunt. The hunger. The poverty. The children with distended bellies and thin arms. And there are guns and soldiers everywhere. The Vietnamese broke Pol Pot's control of the central state apparatus in 1979 and ended the general terror, but he and his troops simply melted back into the jungle to continue fighting. Countless other guerrilla forces were spawned. Neveu seems to have run with them all. He catches wounded soldiers on film as they are being dragged to safety, their eyes glazed and focused on a middle space beyond the camera. Is it 1973 or 1985? Violence in Cambodia is a continuum.

In the early 1970s we used to sit around a little café and listen to old-timers talk about the harlequin days before the war when Cambodia was full of charm. Even the poor ate well then, we were told. We fervently wanted to believe that some day, when the fighting was over, the country would return to that bucolic ideal. It never happened. The war never really ended, as the pictures in this book painfully remind us. If you look closely around the edges of Neveu's pictures taken in the 1990s you see a modicum of prosperity and happiness creeping in. But Neveu is set on the tragedy and turmoil. Even his smiling children are standing by stacks of forlorn wrecked cars or waving guns. Perhaps in Cambodia it could be no other way.