Smor San – Steff Gruber

Smor San

Steff Gruber

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 and is part of a series about landless poor communities in Cambodia.