Though he was a young child at the time it occurred, Mak Remissa still remembers the evacuation of Phnom Penh.

He saw rocket propelled grenades launched into businesses and dark smoke hung in the air as cars and cyclos and houses were ravaged by fire.

He remembers the black-clad militants of the Khmer Rouge carrying weapons openly in the street as the city’s population carried their children, rice and salt and walked their bicycles along besides them, leaving everything else behind.

The emptying of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge as witnessed by Remissa as a child – an early expression of the sheer madness of Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” philosophy – was the inspiration behind his photographic-artwork series Left 3 Days.

Remissa – who was forced to march with his family from his home in Phnom Penh to Takeo province at the age of seven – is now a professional photographer for the European Press Photo Agency.

He told The Post that Left 3 Days refers to the [evacuation] order by the Khmer Rouge who demanded that people leave their homes in Phnom Penh, convincing some of them that it would be temporary and that in three days they could return.”

“I turned the memory of that eviction into a photographic artwork. I saw houses and buildings were burning without any firefighters’ intervention. The billowing of smoke through the city was what I was trying to capture with my photo. I remember the smoke and a long line of people walking off into the distance,” says Remissa.

Left 3 Days was among the 300 works nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet award – the global photography contest that comes with a cash prize equal to just over $110,000 USD – held every 18 months.

This cycle’s theme was “fire” and Remissa has now made it to the shortlist of 13 finalists whose works will be showcased in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Stephen Barber, chair of the Prix Pictet, was quoted as saying that “fire has hardly been out of the news since the inferno that engulfed Notre Dame in Paris in early 2019. We have since seen record rainforest blazes in the Amazon, forest and bush fires in Australia and conflagrations in California.”

“Fire means survival, renewal, and economic prosperity. Yet our abuse of this most capricious of elements is the source of most of our environmental woes,” Barber said.

The 13 finalists are from Lebanon, Japan, USA, USA/Switzerland, Belgium/Benin, Mexico, South Africa, Austria/Nigeria and Cambodia. The winner of the cash prize will be announced December 15, 2021, at the opening of the exhibition in London.

Remissa, 53, told The Post “I have to admit, this is a really big deal for me as an artist and really I hope it will be meaningful to all Cambodians. Prix Pictet is a huge organisation and every artist out there dreams about being selected for this world-famous exhibition.”

Remissa said that an artist must be nominated for the award by one of a group of 300 nominators who are industry experts from around the world including photographers, gallerists, agency heads, academics, authors, publishers, curators, photography foundation heads and others.

“Left 3 Days was nominated by Jessica Hubbard Marr, an academic and historian of artistic photography and a photographer herself. She’s an internationally known expert and I was proud to know that she saw that much value in my work,” says the veteran photographer.

“I was thrilled that the artworks [nominated] are about Cambodia because I’m the first-ever Cambodian in the Prix Pictet. It was exciting to see the name of our country standing next to my name on that list,” Remissa says.

Left 3 Days is a series of photo-artworks that Remissa began work on in 2014 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge’s capture of Phnom Penh.

“I wanted to do something to memorialise those events and the brutality that occurred in Cambodia under that regime. Because I was there, and I remember, but most Cambodians alive today are from a younger generation who haven’t seen the tragedy of war or the resulting pain and bitterness firsthand,” Remissa says.

Left 3 Days consists of photographs of silhouetted scenes cut from paper on a miniature scale and then wreathed in smoke that depict the evacuation of Phnom Penh. Remissa’s unusual technique skillfully evokes the chaos and tragedy of the events he is remembering while also lending them a surreal and indistinct quality that captures the feeling of distant but terrible memories.

“I wish to dedicate this work as a memorial to my respectful father, grandfather and three uncles, as well as all of the other victims who died under the heinous regime of the Khmer Rouge,” writes Remissa in his artist’s statement for Left 3 Days.

The series took him nine months to complete, which isn’t unusual for Remissa, who is painstaking in his attention to detail and has other pieces he’s worked on for as long as up to two years before being satisfied with the result.

When creating as a photo-artist rather than doing his regular job as photo-journalist, Remissa doesn’t just snap photos of what he sees around him and capture things in the present moment. He makes art by combining photography with other techniques, in this case a hybrid form of diorama.

He made the silhouetted figures seen in Left 3 Days out of paper because of the cost associated with hiring actors or models and the limitations it would impose on his creative process.

Of course, paper subjects also have a downside. They are fragile and can’t stand on their own and are unable to move or change poses and must be cut out again for any slight alteration. The lack of depth and detail aside from their shape also had to be taken into account.

“Therefore, I painted them black and in order to hide the fact that they were paper I added smoke, lighting and used perspective to trick the eye. They are recreations of very traumatic memories from long ago,” says Remissa.

With more than 25 years of experience as professional photographer working here in Cambodia and then internationally, Remissa’s career began at the now defunct French-language weekly newspaper Cambodge Soir.

He then moved on to work at the Phnom Penh Post and also studied abroad to further his education. Eventually a career opportunity that he couldn’t pass up with the European Press Photo Agency came along, and he’s worked with them ever since.

“Back then at the Phnom Penh Post, I worked with a lot of foreigners. I was thrilled when I got an assignment there as a photo-journalist because there were very few people in Cambodia working in this profession at the time and very few jobs like that available in the 1990s,” Remissa recalls.

Remissa says that the first generation of Cambodian photographers and journalists who began working after the UN-period – when Cambodia became fully independent again and began modernising – laid the groundwork for those working today by learning the industry from the expats who occupied most of the jobs initially in both the local newspapers and news agencies.

“First, we learned from the foreigners and became friendly with them. This made us equal socially, but we wanted our work to be recognised as well. Gradually that happened and we were given the same opportunities. And once we had those, we wanted not just the opportunity to compete with them, but to actually win,” Remissa says, recounting his early years working in the media industry here in Cambodia.

That generation, he explains, passed their skills and experience along to the next so that today the ratio of foreign to expat journalists has shifted and most jobs in Cambodian media are occupied by Cambodians, but Remissa worries about the future of photo-journalism here.

“I am worried that when we get old, who will replace us? I am not sure if young people want to pursue a photo-journalist career, but I try to be a role-model,” he says.

He said though he has trained many students, it hasn’t been through formal courses taught in schools but informally person-to-person or on the job. Most students of journalism are writers rather than photographers, he notes.

“I want there to be schools that teach this skill, photography and journalism. It’s my dream, but it’s the government and other institutions with resources that are needed to make it happen,” he says.

Remissa says that perhaps when his eyes become too blurry or his arms too weak to carry a camera he will retire to a classroom to share his knowledge and experience with young people in a formal teaching role.

“I always write messages of encouragement and try to be positive towards young people in order to persuade them to work hard and to never think that they are small in front of others,” he says.

Left 3 Days has already been exhibited at the Guimet Museum in France, Musee de L’Elysee in Switzerland and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia.

As the first Cambodian photo-artist nominated to the Prix Pictet and Cambodia’s first finalist, Remissa says that his story should serve as motivation to all young Cambodians – especially artists – to dream big and never limit themselves or their ambitions.

“Most of all I want to encourage [Cambodians] to love each other and our nation,” says Remissa.

For more information visit Make Remissa’s website: https://asiamotion.net/photo-stories/remissa-mak/left-3-days

Or the official website of the Prix Pictet:https://prixpictet.com/portfolios/fire-shortlist/mak-remissa/