Crumbling wall of Phimeanakas Temple. Cambodia. April, 2003

In April 2003 my wife and I spent 3 months traveling through Southeast Asia, after living in Japan and Bangkok for over a decade. The Iraq War was underway when we arrived in Cambodia and combined with the SARS epidemic in Asia, the country had pretty much emptied of tourists leaving the temples of Angkor all but deserted. Th tourist interlude allowed me to explore the temples with my Nikon f/1.4 prime lenses - 28mm, 35mm, 50mm and an 85mm - for a long, serene week. I used T-max 100 film so I could get high enough shutter speeds and later had the film processed at an amazing lab in Tokyo, using Kodak's specially formulated T-max developers. Scanned on Hasselblad Imacon scanner.

As for Angkor, you can barely see the temples for the tourists these days; I suspect that this was the last time you could see the temples this way.

To see more images from the project, click here