A Journey into Cambodia through Photography Tours
Visitors take photos during a tourist tour for photographers, whether amateurs or pros, organized by photographer Alessandro Vannucci in Siem Reap Province. Photo: Alessandro Vannucci
- By Nicolò Tissier
- January 7, 2023 5:00 PM
PHNOM PENH — Alessandro Vannucci is a professional photographer. A native of Italy, he settled in Cambodia in 2008 and now lives in Siem Reap city with his Cambodian wife and their two children. He organizes tours around Cambodia and Asia for amateur photographers.
Although he did not study photography, Vannucci has been passionate about it for nearly 30 years.
In Italy, he worked in event promotion, doing photography in his free time. In 2008, he came to Cambodia to work as a volunteer for a humanitarian organization. In his free time, he became more and more involved in photography and, after a while, realized that there was a potential clientele for tourist tours centered around photography. “That’s when I had the idea of doing this as a business,” he said.
Vannucci is now involved in two businesses specialized in tourist photography tours: Angkor Travel Photography in which he works with a team of expat professional photographers and his own that is Alessandro Vannucci Photography.
“A photography tour is very different from a tourist tour” Vannucci explained. “We don’t work the same way, not at the same hours. For example, we work very early in the day, and also later at sunset, not in the middle of the day when there’s too much light.
“It is not only a tour, but a proper workshop,” he said, for photographers of all levels. During these specialized tours, Vannuci will give technical advice to participants in addition to showing them the good spots to take pictures. “We aim to give an exclusive experience, that a regular visitor couldn’t manage on his own.”
Since Vannucci and his partners have a strong knowledge of the country and speak Khmer, they can arrange to take visitors off the beaten path to see Cambodians’ daily life. “We often take them to meet to the same villagers or fishermen for example,” he said. “It is also a way to help [those villagers].”
Tours include no more than eight participants. Otherwise, Vannucci said, there will be too many people to maintain a good and intimate environment for taking pictures and for doing so in a quiet and respectful way for the Cambodians and the historical sites visited.
After a long and difficult period due to the COVID-19 pandemic during which Vannucci’s businesses nearly shut down, things recently started to get better. And he is confident that the number of visitors who have started returning to the country in 2022 will keep on increasing. “For Italian travelers, bookings have exploded since August [2022],” Vannucci said.
