Smor San

• Photographer
  Steff Gruber, Switzerland
• Category
  Asia

Smor San is a community that lives in a cemetery in Phnom Penh. The inhabitants have constructed makeshift houses on top of tombs and coffins, or inhabited vacant burial chambers. Here they eat dinner, watch TV, hang clothes to dry, care for their kids, and sleep – just centimeters away from the dead. They moved into the cemetery with around 200 graves after sand dredging had led to the collapse of their houses on the riverbank. Steff Gruber`s documentation of life in Smor San is a long-term project that began in 2019.