If you ever survived a genocide, or the aftermath of a genocide, then your parents - and you - are haunted, they feel being surrounded by killers and victims - or are they both?  Beleaguered by the challenges of memory and witnessing.. There are ghosts, not in the 'natural' way: ghosts of victims you don't recognize, of killers you don't recognize, of bystanders you don't recognize - of yourself, as a 'Doppelgänger' wandering without goal and redemption - and you don't recognize yourself..

 

CAMBODIAN GHOSTS was a project born by street photography, by a feeling of a certain connection to the presence of the past. Initiated by a song, a Cambodian-American pop-song by the band Dengue Fever, by interactions with Cambodian-Americans, artists and the mood of exile..

 

“I like that term ghost. It’s not a term I would have thought about. But  I like it, yeah.”

JACK GOLDSTEIN interviewed by Meg Cranston in May 2001 in Venice, California
(quoted from the catalog Jack Goldstein x 10,000, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, 2012)

The project was presented for the first time at META-HOUSE in Phnom  Penh, Cambodia:
The catalog was published on the occasion of the opening on November 8, 2012.

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The project was presented for the first time at META-HOUSE in Phnom​ Penh, Cambodia:
The catalog was published on the occasion of the opening on November 8, 2012.