I came upon a remarkable photoessay by Phil Coomes, photoeditor for the BBC that I thought I should share with you.   It is a story about Photographer Charles Fox a photographer, who is is based in Cambodia., and earlier this year he began to collect family pictures he had found in that country, publishing them to Tumblr and his twitter account.

In 2009, Fox met a Cambodian man named Yanny at a London celebration  celebration of the 2009 Khmer New Year.  “Yanny used to show me his old photographs of life in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, he would tell me how his family moved back into Phnom Penh, and how society started to rebuild itself, all of this whilst flicking through his worn family photo albums illustrating his point.”

On his return to Cambodia, Fox began collecting old family portraits to document this period.  He would copy the images, often bleached, chipped, or water-damages and with them he would collect a tidbit of family commentary – enough to get your imagination going, to recollect what you never knew, the story behind these pictures.

Coomes argues, and I agree, that the social history of the twentieth century is written in family portraits.  I think that we may argue the same for the “selfies” of today.  Somehow these too need to be preserved, and it seems the case as well that the little commentaries that we attach on Facebook and other social media are just enough to get our minds going.

Imagine yourself centuries from now at an exhibition about the twenty-first century.  The room is cool and dark, or perhaps the museum isn’t a room but a projected thought and every second or so an image appears a smiling face, or worse the anguished face of a victim of one of our countless wars and conflicts, from so long ago, now made just a bit more familiar, evoking a sense of almost tangible connection..