Biographie
After graduating from the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme in Lille, Alban Lécuyer has been pursuing a photographic project devoted to the place of history and conflicts in the representation of the urban landscape since 2011. He has been a member of Picturetank co-operative agency since 2017.
Présentation
Phnom Penh stands as a one-of-a-kind contemporary example of a capital that has been almost entirely deserted. The buildings have been abandoned, traffic has been banned, schools and public spaces have been turned into cultivated land. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer regime preached for the domination of peasants over the "new people", the supremacy of the countryside over cities - regarded as decadent -, and tried to implement an egalitarian rural society. Phnom Penh thus became useless and fell silent; it disappeared, symbolically, from the Cambodian landscape.
Forty years later, promoters' advertising has replaced communist propaganda.