Kannetha Brown explores family, trauma and survival

Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia endured a harrowing genocide under the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Nearly a quarter of the country’s population – an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people – were killed. Photographer Kannetha Brown’s mother, Sara, was just five years old when the genocide began. She survived, but was separated from her mother – Kannetha Brown’s grandmother, Simone – and taken into the care of another family in the capital of Phnom Penh.

Sara and Simone spent many years unaware that each other were alive. Simone was sponsored to move to the US, and eventually, through a number of serendipitous connections, they were reunited – nine years later when Sara was 14 years old.

Almost 50 years later, Kannetha is exploring her family history, as well as generational trauma, displacement and migration, through photography. A recent project titled A Familial Stranger brings her to upstate New York, to the quiet town of Hilton, where her grandmother now lives. It is the first time she’s visited her grandmother’s home since she was 14; the experience is filled with emotional weight.

Intimate yet distant, these photographs mirror the complex layers of history and trauma that Kannetha seeks to unpack. “I’ve always avoided taking photographs of my family because it hurts... and it's extremely difficult to photograph,” says Kannetha. “Photographing my family tells my truth, and it’s a way to accept and memorialise it.”

In another project, Two Oceans, she documents her circle of Cambodian Americans living in Rhode Island, while The Garden in Edgewood sees her collaborate with the Tings, a Cambodian family that she grew up near to. Through photographing multiple generations of her family and others’, Kannetha will continue to explore memory, survival and generational trauma – a painful, but healing, process of understanding.