bomb ponds

The Bomb Ponds

Vandy Rattana

There is a Khmer proverb that says: You can hear something a thousand times  and not know it, yet if you see it with your eyes just once, you know. 

- Vandy Rattana 

Between 1964 and 1975 the United States of America military dropped 2,756,941 tons (230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites) of bombs across politically neutral Cambodia. This fi gure went unacknowledged until 2000 when Bill Clinton traveled to Vietnam and quietly released previously classifi ed Air Force

data on American bombings in former Indochina.

Dissatisfi ed with the level of documentation produced on the subject, Vandy Rattana traveled to the ten Cambodian provinces most severely bombed in the U.S. military campaign during the Vietnam War. Along the way, he engaged villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters made by the

bombings, known in the Khmer language as the “bomb ponds”.

The resultant work is a series of nine quiet, mysteriously serene landscape photographs and a confronting one-channel documentary fi lm in which villagers describe their memories of the bombings as well as their relationship to the ponds today. The Bomb Ponds invites audiences to connect with both the fragility and the resilience of the people and the land, and to reconsider the historical thread of America’s actions during the Vietnam War and subsequently, similar acts of violence worldwide.

Vía: socks-studio