This photograph was selected as the opening image for the new Portrait Gallery of Canada’s first exhibition, Personae: Indigenous and Canadian Portraits 1861–2019. It was taken through a mirror high atop the National Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2014.
It is a self portrait, shot late in the afternoon when the light was pleasing. The soft and warm hues of the photograph along with the scratches and marks from the old mirror give it a semblance to analog film, which also is subject to dust and scratch marks. It is a raw, simply shot yet complex portrait because of the history behind the stadium it was shot in.
During the war, it was used as a killing field where thousands of local residents who did not adhere to the Marxist ideology of the Khmer Rouge, were rounded up and executed. It never served as an Olympic stadium throughout its history. Now the upper level functions as an aerobic fitness platform, where free fitness classes are given to middle- aged women who were undoubtedly all young girls at the time of the war and undoubtedly witnessed horror before their eyes.
I arrived later in the afternoon by tuk tuk, and took the long ascent up. The temperature drops to a more comfortable 28c by then. I was loaded up with 4 cameras, both analog and digital. By then, I was doing a lot of self-shooting through mirrors and found one on the upper level. At the moment this was taken, I imagined what it may have looked like behind me, when local city folks were rounded up and brought to the field to face their doom. Not a trace of the past remains in the stadium, unfortunately. Though one can visit other War sites, such as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
Actually, this photo wasn’t even a contender for the Portrait Gallery website. The decision to submit it to the Portrait Gallery team happened in a tent I was sleeping in, in the Sahara Desert in Morocco in early March of this year. I was contacted by Robert Tombs, one of the gallery’s board members, about one of my submissions, an interesting portrait of the late Florence Richler, the widow of the late Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler. It was selected as one of my images for the gallery website.
After several attempts to secure permission from the Richler family for permission to use the photo fell through, I offered up this self portrait to Tombs as a last-minute alternative. All this happened by communicating with both the Richler family and Tombs, through my smartphone device from my tent in the middle of the Sahara, and by sending out the replacement photo file via a weak satellite connection. Technology surprisingly worked flawlessly in the middle of nowhere, under the clear Moroccan desert skies on a gorgeous evening.
I hope my photograph serves as an invitation to all viewers of the website to explore the wide range of beautiful portrait works presented by Canadian artists.
Self portrait, National Olympic Stadium, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2014