Micheline DULLIN

"Phnom Penh 1958-1964"

National Museum of Cambodia

19 November –19 December 2025

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It was in Phnom Penh that Micheline Dullin first became a professional photographer. Until

then, she had combined her practice of painting with a joyful discovery of analog

photography. She became the official photographer of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. She

discovered Cambodia with the freedom and curiosity that would define her throughout her

life, and with a profoundly generous eye for its people — both those she met in the

countryside and the workers she spent long hours alongside on the major construction

projects she was commissioned to document. It was a time of ambitious building sites,

including the Olympic Stadium, where she took many photographs — sometimes

spectacular — yet always attentive to the human presence, even when the individual seems

dwarfed by the scale of what is being built. In all her photographs, one senses a deep

Photo Phnom Penh, 2025

sympathy for those she observes. In a way, her point of view never changed, whether she

was working on assignment or simply recording a moment or scene that moves her.

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She used to say: “One should not define oneself as a photographer ‘of’. One is a

photographer.” And in Phnom Penh of the 1960s, Micheline Dullin was ‘the’ photographer.

This is all the more remarkable given that the profession was rarely taken up by women —

even less so then than now, though in truth, things have hardly changed — and that she took

a close interest in worlds generally considered male domains. Because she worked on

assignment, she was able to produce aerial views that offer a unique testimony of Phnom

Penh at the time — rare documents that allow us to see again buildings that have since

vanished, such as the White Building, or areas like Boeung Kak Lake, and to appreciate how

harmoniously horizontal the city’s layout once was.

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Micheline Dullin always cultivated the balance of the square format, the subtleties of black

and white, and captured the vibration of light with a striking tension between documentary

precision and empathy. Her portrait of Phnom Penh in the early 1960s remains without

equal.

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Bio

Micheline DUMOULIN, known as DULLIN (1927-2020)

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Originally a painter, she became part of the Parisian art scene from 1956 onward, mingling

with filmmakers, painters, and writers. She practiced photography as an amateur, but with

great intensity starting in 1956, using a Rolleiflex camera given to her by her friend Alain

Resnais. She took many photographs in Bolivia and Peru, where her husband had been sent

by UNESCO.

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In 1958, when her husband was assigned to Cambodia, she followed him there with their

daughter. She exhibited her paintings in Phnom Penh and was hired as the official

photographer by Prince Norodom Sihanouk. She documented official events, including the

inauguration of the National Monument, as well as daily life in the capital and the major

construction projects of the time: the Olympic Stadium, the Japanese Bridge, and the

development of the Bassac waterfront. She also photographed in the provinces, capturing

with great closeness the lives of rural inhabitants. Her work extended to Thailand, Laos, and

Hong Kong. From 1964 to 1965, the couple spent a year in Thailand, where they had a son.

In 1965, they left Asia and settled in the Paris region.

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Some of Micheline Dullin’s photographs were shown, alongside those of other

photographers, at the inauguration of the Bophana Center in 2006. In 2012, the city of

Aulnay-sous-Bois, near Paris, where she had lived for many years, dedicated an exhibition

to her, and a book on her Cambodian years was published the same year. At age 85, she

moved to Martigues in southern France, to the house she had bought in 1952, and which

had always remained her anchor. The following year, the Photo Phnom Penh Festival

exhibited some of her photographs outdoors along the Tonlé Sap River.

She died in Martigues in 2020, at the age of 93.