Crossing the Threshold: Cambodia

I am still exploring my photographs
that invite the viewer to "look through a frame."

This frame can be arbitrary, unintentional or deliberate.

Naturally, one's eye enters and moves through
to the other side of the image. 

While browsing I found some

remarkably  "natural," not man made frames. 

I recall intentionally shooting them as you see them.

All photos are unedited.

We landed in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Eyes blinking from the brilliant sun, stepping out of the steel frame of the airplane door,

 we crossed the threshold into an ancient land recovering from war and genocide.

Each day we traveled through one more opening, stepped across one more threshold. And these experiences had a profound effect upon  my heart and perspective of spirituality.

The ancient capital of the Khmer Kingdom is the cultural and spiritual heart of Cambodia. 
It is monumental in scale, it can overwhelm one's senses.


Angkor is one of the wonders of the world. The Khmer civilization dates from AD 800 to 1300.

Restoration is snail paced. But I found those structures that are as time has placed them, the most humbling and moving.

My eyes (and camera)  constantly adjust from brilliant light to bottomless black, the filtering light from a Banyan tree breaking the contrast.

Restoration, yes important, safety concerns, ease of movement over rocky remnants but it seems so stringently sterile, too clean; like wiping a child's pudgy fingerprints from a window where in child-like wonder they just have viewed the tumbling snow.

This is the way I love viewing immenseness, looking for the tiny details. The little "cubby-holes" of the unexpected. 

What roots me to a place are the PEOPLE. After everything is explored, every door way crossed, it is the PEOPLE that matter most;
they hold and anchor my attention.


Kat  Exploring with a  Camera