That Was Then, This Is Now explores intergenerational trauma, memory, and resilience through my family’s experience of the Cambodian genocide and my own journey into fatherhood. The project interweaves large-format film photographs of execution sites, refugee camps, and landscapes tied to family history in Cambodia with photos of my young family in Upstate New York. Photographed between 2020-2025, the project draws on concepts of postmemory and emerging epigenetic research, framing trauma as both emotional and biological inheritance. Photography serves as excavation and testimony, collapsing time and space to create images that are both evidence and elegy. Rooted in my own story—born in a refugee camp in the aftermath of the genocide, estranged from a father who raised me alone and struggled with attempts of suicide, and reunited with him shortly before his death on the eve of my own journey into fatherhood—the work seeks to reflect on how trauma reverberates across generations, honoring the past while affirming the possibilities of healing and transformation. Funds from the Lucie Foundation will be used to partially cover the production and printing of an artist edition of five that will function as a working book dummy to approach publishers and editors, and to secure additional funding to complete the book. A major part of this production will include sequencing of images and editing text that I have written to accompany the work.
