What the Water Holds

Every rainy season, the Tonle Sap does something no other lake in the world does. As the Mekong swells with monsoon water, it overpowers the tributary connecting them and forces it to run backward. The lake fills to four times its dry-season size, rising by nine meters or more, before the rains stop and it slowly drains out again. Cambodian life around the lake has followed this rhythm for generations — homes on stilts, fishing seasons set by the water's rise and fall, a lake that alone provides close to three-quarters of the country's protein.

That rhythm is breaking. Upstream dams have altered the flow the lake depends on. The fish are disappearing. Families who have worked these waters for generations are finding less each year, and the young are leaving for the cities. What has sustained a place for centuries is thinning within a generation.

Greg's photograph of a person holding an umbrella while standing in the lake reminds me of the surrealist painter René Magritte. In his painting Les vacances de Hegel (Hegel's Holiday), an umbrella holds up a glass filled with water — something meant to keep water out, used instead to carry it. Here, Greg shows someone battling the rain while already submerged. The same dichotomy is at work: however hard the inhabitants of the Tonle Sap try to keep the water at bay, it is the lake's water that they cannot live without. It is not an enemy to be shielded from. It is the very condition of their life.

A second comparison came to mind with the artists Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, whose work turns on a curious triangular relationship between humans, nature, and technology — a tug of war between the three that runs through most of their images. Greg's photographs carry a similar tension, though his is between people and nature — specifically, the lake, its surroundings, and the creatures that depend on it. Two images make this most visible. In one, a man's legs and their reflection appear in a mirror propped against parched, cracked ground — as if the land itself has been sucked dry, and the reflection shows a future already waiting for him, ominous and unchanged. In another, a man looks longingly toward a plate holding a single fish. It could mean he waited too long, and the fish arrived only after it had died. Or it could mean the fish never arrived at all — long gone from these waters, never one to reach his plate. Either way, it is a quiet elegy for what the lake no longer reliably gives.

Another of Greg's images stays with me, without needing a comparison. The red balloon hangs over open water, tethered to nothing but a single dead branch breaking the surface below — the only other thing standing in an otherwise empty frame. There's an ominous feel to it. What might once have marked a festive place is now bare — no people, no trees, nothing but that one dead branch left standing. It reads less like celebration than warning.

These are only the associations that came to me, sitting with these four photos. A surrealist image doesn't ask to be solved. You can sit with it, ponder and come to a completely different interpretation. I would like to hear from you what these and the other three frames I left untouched evoke in you.