Remissa Mak

Born in 1970 in Phnom Penh in a family of the wealthy petty bourgeoisie Mak Remissa is today unanimously recognized as the most brilliant photojournalist of the country. This is his social and professional status, but he is much more than that: a model for most of the country's young photographers. His mother was a college professor, his father taught natural sciences at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. He was also one of the administrators of the Olympic Stadium, an emblematic monument in the center of the capital under the Ministry of Education. A way of social commitment as much as an affirmation of status.

After his primary and secondary studies, young Remissa joined the Royal University of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1985 to 1995. He obtained his diploma in the specialty of photography after two years of training financed by the Association Arts Cambodge which was the first to support this practice in Cambodia.

In January 1995 he began a collaboration with Cambodge Soir, a daily newspaper in French language which has just been created by the Editions du Mékong and which will disappear in 2007. Very quickly he became independent and, if he continues with the press by freelancing for The Phnom Penh Post, he favors work for companies, ANZ Royal Bank, Design Group, Royal Air Cambodia, Nestlé, Bates, Total Cambodia among others, and international organizations including UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNFPA, the European Union. Very early on, aware that he had to perfect his training to ensure his professional future, he followed the workshops of the French Cultural Center as early as 1996 and was one of the passionate users of the only black and white laboratory in the capital created by this extremely active place at the time in a city where cultural activities were still rare. It is there that he participated in a first collective exhibition in 1994 before, the following year, presenting his images at the Club des Correspondants Etrangers de Presse in Phnom Penh and then in Paris. His first solo exhibition, "A Photographic Journey" took place in 1997 at the French Cultural Center.

In 2001 he was invited to exhibit at the National Gallery in Ottawa. It is a time when Canada is trying to attract new immigrants and, as his son is just born, he leaves with his family in 2003. At the end of 2005, when he was offered Canadian citizenship, he decided to return to Cambodia.

Since April 2006 he has been an employee of the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA), the German news agency for which he is the correspondent in Cambodia. This full-time job, whose repetitive aspect and coverage of the institutional aspects of political life often bore him, does not prevent him from creating, every two years, a personal series, skillfully elaborated and brilliantly directed.

While he has regularly exhibited in Cambodia, in private galleries, cultural venues and hotels, as well as at the Photo Phnom Penh and Angkor Photo Festivals, he has shown his work extensively abroad. Among others at Providence College in the USA in 2002, at the Noorderlicht photofestival in the Netherlands in 2006, in Paris at Photoquai in 2007 or at the exhibition "Grain and reality" at the University of Geneva Hospitals in 2008.

He teaches regularly at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh and at the French Institute of Cambodia.