Hands, Crabs and Kep Market Mornings: Inside Aurélie Fischer's Art for Kep Residency
- Art for Kep
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 min read
How a chance arrival in Cambodia turned into a decade-long love affair with the camera — and why Kep's fishermen, market vendors and craftsmen are her latest subject.
Some photography careers start with a plan. Aurélie Fischer's started with a plane ticket she almost didn't need to buy.
A Career Born Out of Crisis
“Becoming a photographer was always my dream, and I made it,” Aurélie says simply. But the path there was anything but simple. In 2019, after a stretch of time living in India, financial pressure forced her to consider heading home to Belgium and back into a conventional job. Instead, she booked one more trip — to Cambodia.
It was meant to be a stopover. Then COVID happened.
“I was here with a camera, with a computer, and I decided to work as a photographer,” she recalls. “It was the beginning of my career as a photographer.” With the country locked down and the temples of Angkor all but empty, Aurélie found herself with something few photographers ever get: unlimited, unhurried access to one of the most photographed sites on Earth, with almost no one else around.
“I really enjoyed taking a lot of pictures in Angkor Wat, in the temples. I was alone, and the energy was incredible.”
Learning Cambodia Through Its People
What began as solitary temple photography soon became something more relational. Aurélie got to know local children living around the Angkor complex, who took her off the tourist track and showed her the ruins “in a different way.” It's a theme that runs through everything she's shot since: access earned through relationships, not just permits.
After Angkor, she spent four years photographing for an international school, sharpening her craft on a steady professional footing. In between, she also built a personal, artistic project — a series exploring reflections in Cambodia's salt fields — work that grew out of the same patient, observational eye that first found her in the temples, well before Kep ever entered the picture.
Why Kep, Why Now
Aurélie's latest chapter has brought her to the Cambodian coast, as part of the Art for Kep artist residency. For her, it's a return to the kind of unhurried, immersive process that shaped her earliest work.
“I'm really happy to get back to look for art series in Kep, especially this place along the beach,” she says. “It's amazing, and I really enjoy exploring Kep — meeting people, working as a fisherman, as a sailor, at the market. It's really interesting for me.”
That immersion shows in the images she's already produced during her time in residence. A blue swimmer crab, freshly caught, held up between manicured fingers against the blurred neon of a night market. A fan of skewered mackerel presented for inspection, the vendor's face just out of frame. A weathered hand hovering — patient, deliberate — over a pile of rambutans still bundled with their stems, a gesture that says more about a lifetime of market mornings than any posed portrait could.
These aren't tourist snapshots of “exotic” Cambodia. They're close, textured, and quietly respectful — evidence of a photographer who spends enough time in a place to be trusted with its details.
The Vision Behind the Residency
Asked what she hopes to capture during her time with Art for Kep, Aurélie's answer is direct: she wants to show the life of Kep through the hands of its villagers and their craft.
It's a fitting mission statement for a residency built around slow looking. Rather than a single hero shot of the coastline, Aurélie is building a visual record of labour and skill — the crab seller's grip, the fisherman's catch, the market vendor's practiced sorting of fruit — the small, repeated gestures that keep a coastal town like Kep running every single day.
Follow the Series
Aurélie Fischer's residency work will continue to unfold over the coming weeks as part of the Art for Kep artist residency programme, offering a fresh, intimate portrait of Kep's fishing and market communities through the eyes of an artist who has spent her career learning to see Cambodia from the inside.
Are you an artist looking for space, time and inspiration to create? Art for Kep welcomes applications from artists across all disciplines. Learn more and apply at www.artforkep.org.
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