Chum Kreal commune is part of three districts in Kampot province, where salt fields can be found, and the only areas in Cambodia to harvest the mineral. The production process starts off with a controlled release of sea water, which spills into bare flatten fields, through an intricate maze of canals and pumps. (Words and Images by Nicolas Axelrod)
Nicolas Axelrod is a photographer based in SE Asia since 2008 and founding member of RUOM, an organic collaboration in Phnom Penh between photographers, journalists, videographers, and researchers, drawn together by a passion for social documentary work. – See more of their work at: http://www.ruom.net/about-us/#sthash.9LNyCThx.dpuf
Jiejin Qiu, is six months pregnant. Under China’s one-child policy Qiu, and others like her, could expect to have just one baby. Since being introduced in 1979, the policy has resulted in a generation of only children. The state estimates that 400 million births have been averted since 1980, saving scarce food resources and helping to pull families out of poverty.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
Reuters Photographer Carlos Barria photographed a person born in each year China’s one child policy has been in existence; from a man born in 1979, to baby Huang Aiting (pictured above) born in 2013. Barria asked them if they would like to have siblings.
My uncle, Thaï Doan na Champassak, published Ancestral Voices by Collins – London in 1956 and began his autobiography with this sentence. Mobilised in Algiers during the Second World War, he was sent to China as a trained parachutist in charge of a secret mission destined for clandestine entry into Indochina, then occupied by the Japanese. This extraordinary story has its beginnings in Calcutta, the starting point for his mission to Chungking. In the first chapter he gives a vivid description of the ex-capital of British India just four years before independence.
Tiane Doan na Champassak
Having travelled frequently to India since 1996 it never occurred to me that Kolkata (formerly the anglicised name Calcutta) would inspire me to produce a body of work focused on its street life and I owe it to my uncle for giving me that desire. In fact it is in the streets of Kolkata that I find the most absolute representation of Indian reality. It is also the only city which holds such an intense concentration of extremes; quiet and loud, rich and poor, clean and dirty, modern and old, beautiful and ugly, past and present. This continuous duality has become my leitmotiv and is the reason I deliberately chose to focus on its street life in order to best represent the chaos of this huge megalopolis of over fifteen million inhabitants. (by Tiane Doan na Champassak)
In northern Iraq, Yazidi men and women tell of being captured, detained and tortured by militants. Meet a few of the lucky survivors. Tens of millions of people around the world have fled their homes to escape war or persecution. Thousands more follow every day. Another girl, boy, woman or man every time you blink.
UNHCR/Dominic Nahr
We created this website to share some of their extraordinary stories of survival, hope and home.
TRACKS began with a focus on Syrians displaced and dispersed by a relentless, brutal war. Now it takes you all over the world. While the massive scale of these humanitarian crises is hard to fathom, we hope these stories will help show the human costs of conflict in a way that is easy to grasp and impossible to ignore.
