Phnom Penh, Cambodia
$350 - $500 / Day
Request a demoRoun Ry is a freelance documentary photographer based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He focuses on environmental and social issues and human interest across the country. As a Cambodian documentary photographer, Roun focuses on communities living around the Tonle Sap Lake, the Mekong River, and the mangrove forests in Cambodia’s coastal areas—regions undergoing rapid environmental and social transformation. Roun focuses on communities around the Tonle Sap Lake, the Mekong River, and Cambodia’s coastal mangroves—areas facing rapid ecological and social change. His projects, including Our Village, Resistance: To Live, and The Last Mangrove, explore how development, climate change, and displacement reshape identities, livelihoods, and people’s connection to the land. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, China Dialogue, Asia Society, and Reuters, and he has collaborated with organizations such as UNICEF UK, WHO, UN Women, CARE International, RECOFTC, We World Onlus.
Banlung, Cambodia – When her two teenage daughters started going to high school three years ago, Thong Samai began selling traditional wine that she makes with herbs gathered from the forest to sell alongside soft drinks at the entrance of Yeak Laom, a sacred lake that has become a popular ecotourism destination in eastern Cambodia.
Nuon Oun, a resident of Tropaeng Thmor in southern Cambodia, watched this summer as a cement company started obliterating the side of the mountain facing his village. A gash runs for hundreds of metres from the top of the southernmost face of Phnom La’ang to the base, with diggers and dump trucks biting into the mountain’s flank like flies. “There were three explosions this morning,” said Oun from a small dry goods shop and hair salon where residents gather on a Sunday afternoon in late July.
The workers scrambled deep in the belly of the sand barge, the muscles in their arms visibly straining as they each held steady a thick green hose blasting a torrent of water. Their 1,500-cubic-meter barge was sidled against a pump station, a smaller, flat barge with a crowded deck dominated by a hulk of roaring machinery that powered a flexible suction pipe wide enough to swallow up a child. When reporters visited the pump station Wednesday afternoon, the pipe was dangling into the hold of the
Reminiscences such as this are not uncommon among those who had the opportunity to visit Sihanoukville, a small city on the Cambodian coast, before a massive influx of foreign capital, mostly from Chinese investors, radically changed the urban landscape in the second half of the 2010s. From quiet seaside town known mostly as a backpacker destination, the place turned first into a booming frontier city with aspirations to become the ‘new Macau’ and then into a notorious haven for online scam
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