SIEM Reap’s fashionable Hotel de la Paix plays host to a launch of an Angkor Photo Festival dual exhibition tonight which features work from the acclaimed Paolo Patrizi and 17-year-old local Chan Sokdam’s second solo exhibition as an upcoming photographer.

A self-taught documentary photographer, Paolo Patrizi showcases a series of images entitled European Starlings.

He began his career in London, working on freelance assignments for British magazines and design groups, until he started developing projects of his own.

Paolo’s recent work has explored the contradictions between traditions and modernity and cultural disconnections produced from rapid economic growth.

European Starlings illustrates thousands of birds in the city of Rome forming together in the sky to create a beautiful abstracted silhouette called a ‘murmuration’.

Sokdam, an Anjali House graduate, presents his second solo exhibition titled Life and Disability.

Sokdam’s talent in photography was discovered in November 2009, during the Anjali Photo Workshop, and he concentrates on bringing Cambodian realism into photos built on the theme of disability.

The images hang from the large tree at the heart of the hotel, in the spectacular Fire Garden.