Farewell to an Angkor institution

Phnom Penh Post 08/01/2010

ANGKOR archaeological mainstay Christophe Pottier will leave the Ecole Francais d’Extreme Orient (EFEO) on January 15 after serving as the Asian studies school’s director since 1999. Pottier was involved in opening the centre in Siem Reap in 1992.

The Frenchman will head to Australia to spend a year or two doing research at the University of Sydney’s Cambodia research cluster.

He will remain co-director of the Greater Angkor Project, a joint effort between the EFEO, the University of Sydney and the Apsara Authority.

“I’ll still be in Angkor quite often and be very involved with Angkor studies,” Pottier said.

He arrived in Siem Reap in 1992 with his wife and a 50-kilogram box of belongings on a one-year contract .

“It’s quite funny to be leaving 18 years later,” he said.

So does he feel any sadness on vacating his adopted homeland after so many years?

“I am a stupid, French, archaeologist guy, so I’m not so much into emotions,” he said, cracking a smile.

Pottier restored the Terrace of Leprous King and the northern staircase of the Terrace of the Elephants at Angkor Thom the 1990s. He was also instrumental in discovering the actual enormous size of the ancient Angkor capital, through the use of aerial mapping and spatial analysis. The study of the size and organisation of the Angkor territory was his PhD subject.

Pascal Royere will take over at the EFEO. Royere started work with the EFEO in 1993 and has been supervising the Baphuon temple restoration program since 1995.

A pat on the backpack for travel guide creators

Phnom Penh Post 22/12/2009

Developers of a new application for the Apple iPhone say the travel guide will soon prove an essential tool for visitors exploring Cambodia’s tourist attractions

A screen grab taken from the new travel guide application in use on an iPhone shows tourists at Angkor Wat.THE famous Angkor Wat ruins is expected to feature soon in what is touted asCambodia’s first dedicated iPhone application.

The app, named Angkor after the 11th-century temple, was developed by Australian-owned online travel site Travelfish. The phone-based guide focuses on the Kingdom’s famous Angkor-era ruins and Siem Reap.

A screen grab taken from the new travel guide application in

use on an iPhone shows tourists at Angkor Wat

Currently undergoing the approval process by Apple, the app is the next step for the company, which has been selling PDF guides to Siem Reap for the past three years with much success.

Travelfish, which produces original content on Southeast Asian destinations such as Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, partnered with a South Africa-based development team to begin work on the project in September.

Famed patron of Angkor "Hirayama" dies

Phnom Penh Post: Famed patron of Angkor dies

JAPANESE painter Ikuo Hirayama, who campaigned for the preservation of Angkor Wat and other cultural icons and was known for his works on the Silk Road and Buddhism, died on Wednesday at the age of 79.

Hirayama died of a stroke at a Tokyo hospital, according to his art museum in western Hiroshima. He is known for his efforts to preserve global cultural treasures such as the Angkor Wat temples, China’s Mogao Caves and Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhist monuments, which were dynamited in 2001 by the Taliban.

His goal was “to make people of all races and religions aware of the value of these human treasures, thus leading to mutual understanding and the promotion of world peace”, said UNESCO, which made him a goodwill ambassador in 1988.

Teruo Jinnai, representative for UNESCO in Cambodia, described the role played by Hirayama in making the rescue of the Angkor temples an international priority: “Immediately after the 1991 peace accords, King Sihanouk made an appeal to the international community to save Angkor. For UNESCO, this was an opportunity to assist Cambodia through the aspect of culture. Culture unites people … because it is shared by everyone.

“Hirayama was one of the people who initiated the response to the Cambodian appeal.

When Japan wanted to extend assistance and needed an expert, Hirayama was one of the few in Japan who could start to make suggestions,” Jinnai said.

This was in part because Hirayama’s own artistic legacy was born in the aftermath of terrible destruction. At the age of 15, Hirayama survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima. Not only was he a witness to the destruction it caused – Hirayama would struggle with radiation-related illness for decades.

At the Tokyo Conference in 1993, the contributions of Hirayama, alongside Angkor specialist Yoshiaki Ishizawa and others, were instrumental in the formation of the International Coordination Committee (ICC) Angkor, said Jinnai. This body would eventually give way to Apsara, the authority that currently manages the Angkor temple sites.

Local photographer seeing the Kingdom in a new light

Phnom Penh Post Hacking a digital camera so it records inivisible light is not the usual approach to making pictures – but Meoun Nhean is not your usual photographer

Angkor Wat has been photographed from every conceivable angle and light from sunup to sundown. It hosts millions of tourists a year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a visitor who isn’t trying to capture its beauty through his own lens.

So snapping a truly unique picture of the temple seems like an impossibility.But it’s a challenge he thrives on.

Finding new ways of capturing Cambodia’s picturesque places is Moeun Nhean’s artistic passion, and his recent work – which uses a digital camera to record light waves that are invisible to the human eye – shows the Kingdom’s most recognisable locale from a different perspective.

In a photo of the entrance to the Bayon temple in Siem Riep, the statues lining the road look normal, but are shaded by bright white trees that appear to be covered with snow. In a photo of Angkor Wat, the temple looks purple, the sky looks green, and the trees reflect the same ghostly white. These images have not been digitally manipulated on a computer, but produced in-camera.

Although Moeun Nhean’s photos are taken with digital cameras, infrared photography, and the ethereal effect it creates, has been practised since the early 1900s.

In infrared photography, the film or sensor is made sensitive to infrared light – light which is invisible to the human eye. Red or almost opaque filters are then used to allow infrared light through while blocking some or all of the visible light.

The fluorescent look of foliage created with this process is called the “Wood effect”, after Robert W Wood, who pioneered infrared photography.