Photographing Cambodia’s ancient Ta Prohm Temple, before the tourists arrive

Photo: David Cummings/Special to The Star

Jan 29, 2012
by David Cummings
Special to The Anniston Star 

“Was that a big cat?” my wife, Lesa, asked as we walked down the dark path.

“I hope not,” I replied.

We were using our cellphones as flashlights as we walked toward Ta Prohm Temple in Cambodia last November. It was a half-hour before sunrise, and we could hear cicadas and monkeys in the dense jungle.

Our driver had dropped us at the temple’s entrance road and had quickly left for the journey back to Siem Reap, the area’s hub of tourism. We hoped he didn’t know something about wild animals that we didn’t. We wished we had thought of flashlights.

There were no lights within miles. Jungle noises were the only sensory input as we shuffled along in the dark.

For a year, we had been looking forward to seeing the many temples in the area around Angkor Wat. There are as many as a hundred temple complexes in 70 square miles.

Some are as many as 1,000 years old. The jungle has reclaimed many of them.

They are the largest religious sites in the world, and have languished in mystery until just recently. Tourism has brought people to these great sites for only the last decade or so, because Cambodia has had terrible times with civil war and the regime of Pol Pot’s Communist government.

Millions of land mines had to be cleared before it was even safe to walk in this area. Each year, more Western tourists come to discover these sites as they are being reclaimed from the jungle overgrowth.

Lesa and I wanted to photograph these places before the inevitable tourist infrastructure ruined it forever. We had gotten to Russia about 10 years too late. The pyramids of Egypt are surrounded by souvenir sellers that ruin the experience. Even the rural areas around the Great Wall of China don’t seem real because of the parking lots and handrails that have been added. We desperately wanted to find a Real Place that wasn’t totally screwed up by the tourist hordes.

I was hoping that these Cambodian temples would be a good addition to my lifelong series of photographs of holy places around the world. Lesa just wanted to be away from home so we could do something fun together while she tried out her new camera.

We decided to get up at 4 a.m. each day we were there, and be at different temples as the first light gave details to the scene. We had seen the dozens of tourist buses around the hotels, and we knew what that would mean by around 9 a.m. Our only hope was to get there first.

Lesa stopped in a clearing. “Is this it?” she asked.

As we stood peering into the gloom, we could gradually see walls of gray stone, and tall trees seemingly growing out of the walls themselves.

We stood transfixed as the temple took form in the growing light.

Within 15 minutes, we were working. I went to the inner-courtyard and found some wonderful views.

Lesa set up her tripod near the tall strangler fig tree that Angelina Jolie walked past in that awful Tomb Raider movie.

Two hours later, we found each other on the far side of the complex, each with stories to tell about what great scenes we shot and how the other’s pictures just couldn’t measure up.

Lesa got great photos of the trees growing out of the walls and detail shots of fallen leaves on the stones. She showed the age of the carvings that had been exposed to the elements for hundreds of years without people knowing they were there.

I tried to show the structures in the context of being ancient places of worship, with the jungle overgrowth adding incredible visual complication to the scene. I moved around trying to get the early-morning light to rake across these stones in the same way that makes the gothic cathedrals of Europe so dramatic.

By 9 a.m., everything changed. We lost the total silence that we’d had. People came by the hundreds. Busloads of Chinese tourists climbed on the stones and took each other’s photos. Laughter and excitement filled the area. Dozens of people were in each part of the temple. Nobody could take a photograph without other folks in shorts and hats climbing around and being in the way.

The sun was overhead by now, and the scene had too much contrast to shoot. Shadows were too dark, and highlights were too light. Photos taken now would just look like everybody else’s snapshots.

Lesa and I sat on a rock and watched for a while, knowing our shooting day was over. We still had time to go back to the hotel during breakfast hours. We actually had tears of joy in our eyes. For just a short while, we had “owned” one of the last Real Places in the world.

David Cummings has traveled as far afield as Antarctica, camera in hand. When he’s not traveling, he runs a dental practice in Anniston.