New Photo Archives at Angkor Database

In May 2019, AngkorDatabase and Archimages Cambodia started a fruitful collaboration aimed at making an impressive iconographic fund easily accessible to Angkor lovers.

Since the 1990s, librarian Jean-Jacques Donard and photographer Philippe Bataillard have been identifying, collecting, digitizing in high resolution and labeling some 40,000 iconographic documents around South East Asia and Europe.

National archives, private collections, published yet hard-to-find art and history books, have been thoroughly reviewed and digitized with utmost care in order to keep the memory alive.

AngkorDatabase has selected about 3,000 photos and reproductions from the rich Archimages fund, starting to add captions in English and French, and to organize them in sub-collections such as:

• The Builders -- how the early explorers and archeologists from the two previous centuries pictured the mastery of Khmer builders and architects from the ancient times.
• The Sculptors -- Khmer sculpture and stone carving as it was progressively unearthed, restaured and decrypted through the modern era.
• Mapping the Temples -- a collection of plans, maps, sketches reflecting the advance of archeological and historical knowledge during the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.
• Angkorian Perspectives -- overall views of the main ancient Khmer monuments, attempts to grasp the scope and organization of the Angkorian complex, and the very first aerial views of this vast site.
• Angkorian Scenes-- images capturing the intimate connection Khmer villagers, priests, dancers and royalties kept with Angkor since the early modern times.
• Khmer Influence Abroad -- iconography related to Khmer worshipping places built across territories of what is known nowadays as the modern countries of Thailand and Lao.
• Angkor Replicas -- From 1889 till 1937, the French colonial power instructed architects, sculptors and craftsmen to rebuild fascinating (if often inaccurate) replicas of Angkor Wat for various World Fairs and Colonial Exhibitions in Paris or Marseilles.

...and more to come!

Note: Archimages collections of photographs and documents are posted on Angkor Database website with their original label codes.

If you wish to obtain high-resolution files and/or professional prints for one or several of these images, please email Archimages here with the label code(s) in the Subject line and your requirements (file size, print format, shipping...).

Browse the collections here.