What's it want to be stuck between worlds - to feel like you're neither something nor another? That is the situation Pete Pin finds himself in. Pin is a Cambodian-American photographer based in Big apple. He's currently engaged on a protracted term project to chronicle the lives of Cambodians in America. He calls the project Displaced, and says it's an exploration of psychological disconnection and the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Brian Calvert has more from the Bronx, Manhattan.
Pete Pin, 30, is on a quest. The photographer is are seeking for his heritage amid the Cambodian enclaves of America. Along the best way, he's documenting dislocation.
Today, he has come to a Cambodian temple, within the Bronx neighborhood of latest York City.
"This temple is the middle of the Cambodian community, and it is very, very small as you will see that," Pin notes. "There's just one monk here. And it's carved out of the distance here on this neighborhood where it's this backyard here, and right outside is someone else's backyard. There is a very amazing sense of community inside the Bronx, but you notice it in people's homes, and also you see it isolated in certain areas."
Isolation is a recurring theme in Pin's photographs - from California, where he grew up, to Philadelphia, Manhattan and other corners of America. Another theme is disconnection:
"What's style of beautiful about photography is that these items are only there, you recognize, they're always there… however the photos are a manifestation of my very own generational, cultural and historical displacement," Pin explains.
Only a couple of hundred Cambodian families live within the Bronx. This temple is a prime center of worship for them. It's the Cambodian New Year, and these boys are learning to put in writing in Khmer, the language in their motherland.
These are the moments Pin seeks to capture, as he puts together a growing exhibition for Cambodians in America, for those back home, and for non-Cambodians who won't understand the difficulties Cambodian refugees have had inside the US.
But Pin, whose parents survived the Khmer Rouge, also shoots to locate part of himself.
"The name of the project is Displaced, and what that truly means is that there is without a doubt this physical displacement in relation to what it means to be a refugee," Pin adds. "i will not say myself that i am physically displaced, because i am not. I'm American, this is often my home. But i'm culturally displaced. I exist during this vacuum of identity, where i do not know what it means to be either fully American or Cambodian. And also to that, there's this legacy that I actually have in my heart and on my shoulders that was given to me at birth resulting from what my parents lived through. And i'm trying for many of my adult life to actually understand what that implies.
Today what that suggests is a brief language lesson of his own, once the camera is put away.
From WhatNewsToday.net
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