David Holliday’s photos exhibited at the Plantation Hotel on Street 184 are not so much an artist’s rendition of reality than reality taken to its own extreme of colors and contrasts.
As the name of his series “Raw” indicates, the British-Australian photographer works on “raw” images, a digital-photography term used to describe a photo still in the camera that has not been compressed or processed in any way.
Within minutes of taking a shot, Mr. Holliday works on the image to sharpen shades and variations. “It does not work with every photo,” he said.
He designs a work in advance, going to locations in Phnom Penh that will provide the subjects and colors he is looking for, and then framing each image as if he were painting it.
For this exhibition opening Saturday and running through mid-July, Mr. Holliday built collages of 12 photos on the same theme and color schemes.
His cyclo series is deliberately “cartoon-like,” he said, a Phnom Penh comic strip inspired by the famous French illustrated books “Tintin.”
One montage featuring cans and bottles is his Cambodian take on Andy Warhol’s famous soup can paintings. Another one features cityscapes ranging from night scenes in gray to day shots in pale orange and yellow.
The 50-something photographer, who comes from a family of artists, co-founded an aboriginal art gallery in Australia and has done work on a regular basis for the Sculptors Society in Sydney.
He has lived in Phnom Penh for two years.
