Ciro Totku's interview to Cambodia Daily
By Matthew Rusling

While the slums of Phnom Penh may elicit attention from NGOs, journalists and the occasional lawmaker, they may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for an abstract photographer. But Ciro Totku, those latest collection is on display at the Raffles Hotel Le Royal until Nov 3, sees Phnom Penh as a place imbued with an intensity of contrasts and shapes found in few other places.

"The dirtiest places are the most inspiring," he says.

"As a rule these are small areas: 200 by 200 meters inside dirty districts of big cities," he says, citing the area behind Phnom Penh's central market, as well as parts of his home-town, Moscow, as prime examples. "You cannot find the same images anywhere in the world," he says of Phnom Penh.

The name of the 21-piece exhibition is "Time Lapse", and the theme - while not always evident - is the fleeting relationship of people with the things around them.

"All subjects of images will rapidly disappear with time and will never be decrypted," the 39-year-old photographer said. "All multicolor walls will be repainted soon."

Using tightly framed shots to tell larger stories, perhaps the most obvious commonality among Totku's photos is their ability to arouse the viewer's curiosity about the truth behind the image. "Hirayama Lake", for instance, looks like a snow-covered mountain but is actually a photograph of a broken piece of wood and some plastic that the photographer found in Sihanoukville.

With thousands of tiny black dots encroaching on a few white slabs, the photograph entitled "Epidemos" compels the viewer to imagine a virus overtaking the white blood cells. "The picture makes me think about a global epidemic - past or future," Totku said.

"Prostitution" is another attention grabber, featuring an image as blunt as its title. A few blotches resembling a 2-year-old's finger-painting symbolize what Totku says is the wasted life of sex workers. "The picture is banal. It's straightforward, primitive, but it attracts your attention," he added.

At times Totku has to wait for exactly the right weather and lighting conditions to coalesce in order to capture the image he's looking for. "It happens that I had to wait weeks to make a picture, In other cases, I have only few seconds," he said, adding that he never uses PhotoShop or any other montage or alternation programs.

Totku's personal favorite in the collection is "Two Stars."

"Personally, for me it looks like a ruined city after a nuclear attack. Do you imagine the night of August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima?" he asked. "In fact, it is a photo of an old garage door."