Throughout the 1980’s, over 150,000 Cambodian refugees, survivors of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, resettled in the United States from refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border
Pete Pin spent five months photographing a small Cambodian community in the Bronx. For him, the work is personal: he was born in a refugee camp in Cambodia.
Pete Pin spent five months last year photographing a small Cambodian community that has settled in the Bronx. The quiet photographs — of a woman cutting green beans on the floor, of a man walking in winter’s first snow — are part of a long-term project documenting Cambodian refugees in the United States.
[slidepress gallery=’petepin_theave’] Hover over the image for navigation and full screen controls Pete Pin The Ave play this essay “My whole take on the Telegraph life is, basic…
My rationale for the studio shots were to strip the subjects from their environment with the aim of enabling the viewer to empathize with the subjects first and foremost as human beings. All of the subjects came into my makeshift studio exactly as they were on Telegraph. The street shots – currently a work in progress – in turn provides the context. In the course of working on this project, I at times fully immersed myself on Telegraph; I have slept on the street, under bridge overpasses, spent time in squat houses, and even hitchhiked with a group of young travelers with nothing but the clothes on my back
