Raised in Paris in a rather conventional family Marylise Vigneau developed an early taste for peeping through keyholes and climbing walls. She studied “Compared Literature” at la Sorbonne and her thesis was about cities as characters in Russian and Central-European novels. Her education is essentially literary but photography became more and more her language during her life’s journey.
During the past 8 years, she has been mainly documenting life in Asia focusing on cities and on what time and development or isolation do to them. She visits the periphery of our habitats in search of fragile beauty of human existence with its desires, humour and abysses. She likes to play with opposites; absence and presence, emptiness and fullness, isolation and multitude, fondness and irony, the very near and the far away. The inner and the strange. Her work has been shown in Angkor Photo Festival, Foto Istanbul, Yangon Photo Festival, Nairang Gallery in Lahore and Focus Photography Festival in Mumbai. It has also been published in Pix Quarterly (India), Asia Life and Milk (Cambodia). Her ongoing work about Cambodia has been exhibited in November 2015 at the Delhi Photo Festival and will be screened at the Angkor Festival 2015.
Little Stories Of Phnom Penh
Reality might be witty, inventive or mischievous despite a derelict or tragic background. This is particularly true in Phnom Penh where different levels of reality get blended into each other, building a unique crossover. The opening picture of an old man sitting near a staircase painted with a real-fake, idealized view of Phnom Penh, is an illustration of this. These little stories of Phnom Penh are a play between fondness and irony, grace and kitsch, the inner and the strange.
All the pictures are part of an ongoing project started in 2012.
To see more of Marylise’s work, check out her website.
Images provided by Marylise Vigneau and Anzenberger.