Why One Hundred Muses

Chem Vuth Sovin and Touch Sokunthea—better known as Alex Tee—came up through Cambodian photography on parallel tracks. Sovin opened SPKPLUS Studios in January 2007. Alex was already working alongside him through those early years. They were two photographers building reputations, building businesses, getting paid. That part of the work mattered. But it never quite filled the place that made them artists in the first place.

The first frame of what would eventually become One Hundred Muses was taken before the project had a name—or even a thought of one.

August 2008. A Ghanaian model walked into the studio. Her first name was Sharifah—her full name lost to almost two decades of moving studios, switching hard drives, and the small everyday erosions of a long career. They remember the shoot. They remember the way the light fell on her skin. They don't remember her surname, and they've never quite forgiven themselves for that. It is, in some ways, the original lesson of this project: that an image outlives the index card it was filed under, and that the work and the person both deserve more care than busy young photographers usually know how to give.

Sharifah was the beginning. They just didn't know it yet.

For the next two years they kept doing what young photographers do—clients, paychecks, the work that builds a business. But the pictures they'd taken of her sat in the back of both their minds, quietly insisting that something more was possible.

In September 2010, they joined forces and opened PlusMax Studios. One of the first conversations they had was about something that had been sitting inside both of them since that afternoon with Sharifah: they had to keep their passion alive. Working only for clients didn't allow that. At best, a photographer controls fifty percent of what ends up on the screen—maybe a little more. The other half belongs to whoever's paying. That's the deal. You accept it.

But there was also work that nobody could take from them. So they decided to make it. Quietly. On their own terms. They would shoot one hundred individuals—for nobody, for no campaign, for no brief. Just for the work. For the freedom of it. For the part of them that was an artist before any of this became a career.

They financed the entire thing themselves. Nobody touched the creative direction. Nobody told them what kind of person could be in front of the lens, or how they should look, or what they should wear, or what they shouldn't.

The name came later. The number came later. The structure, the two sets, all of it came later. The beginning was a Ghanaian woman named Sharifah—and a feeling they couldn't shake.

A hundred is a lot. It still is, even in 2026.

You can't shoot one hundred muses in a year. You can barely do ten. There were stretches where life took over and the project paused—clients, businesses, COVID, everything. Even now, Sovin and Alex still need to shoot at least two dozen more to complete the original number. They'll get there.

The word muse was deliberate. A muse isn't a model. A model performs. A muse becomes the subject of an experiment—someone you trust to walk into uncertainty with you and find something neither of you could have made alone. That's what these people were. From every walk of life. From every gender. Some had never been in front of a camera. Some were already famous. None of them were treated as professionals. All of them were treated as muses.

One Hundred Muses is divided into two sets—The Beauty and The Body.

Set One—The Beauty.

Set One explores the side of a person that fashion rarely reaches. The inner world. The unguarded moment. The emotion beneath the surface. Beauty, here, belongs to everyone. It always did.

Within Set One live two sub-projects: Visages and The Cut.

Visages—French for faces—is a study in beauty held still. The eye, the brow, the breath before someone speaks. Where the body retreats and the face does the work alone. Where craftsmanship lives in millimeters and shadow.

The Cut is the fashion-forward chapter. Where clothing becomes the subject. Where styling, silhouette, and structure carry the weight. The chapter that proves Cambodian fashion photography doesn't need to borrow its language from anywhere else—it has its own.

Set Two—The Body.

Strength. Physicality. Performance. The body at its most exposed and its most powerful. Set Two doesn't distinguish by gender. It strips everything back to what remains when there is nothing left to take away. That's the core of The World Was Born Naked—the chapter most people associate with the project. The unguarded body. The frame stripped of everything decorative. The argument that the human form has nothing to apologize for and never did.

All three chapters include people of every gender. The work has never been about who is in front of the lens—only about how completely they are seen.

Yes. More than they expected.

The project taught them how to work with people. How to talk. How to build trust deep enough that a person would bring their full self to a shoot, whatever form that took—a styled couture frame, a tight close-up of an eye, a body with nothing on it but light. That kind of trust isn't built with a contract. It's built because the person on the other side of the camera believes that you see them—actually see them—and that what you make together will be worth it.

Looking back now, the shift is visible. People in Cambodia are starting to understand that craftsmanship matters. That fashion photography has a voice. That art doesn't need a foreign passport to be taken seriously. That the body, the face, the garment—each carries its own kind of dignity. People come up to Sovin and Alex now and tell them the work has meant something. Companies have offered to sponsor exhibitions. The conversation has changed.

They'd like to think they had something to do with that.

That they arrived at this work through curiosity, refusal, and craft. That they did not begin with permission. That they began with instinct, pressure, resourcefulness, and the desire to produce images that could hold their own—anywhere.

Every shoot was a negotiation between ambition and limitation. Clothes, bodies, light, gesture, makeup, mood—all of it had to resolve into a single frame that felt inevitable. That's what they were trying to make. Inevitable images.

And one more thing—the only thing, really, that they'd want anyone to take from this project: be who you are. Don't be afraid to show it. Don't carry shame that was given to you by someone who hasn't lived your life. While you're at it, do it as well as you possibly can.

It means everything.

The muses in this archive came from every kind of background, every kind of body, every gender. They weren't all models. They weren't used to being seen this way. Many of them took a leap of faith—and that faith built something none of them could have built alone.

Today, people are comfortable showing themselves on social media in seconds. Back when Sovin and Alex started, that wasn't the world. Convincing someone to be photographed honestly—face, fashion, or fully bare—took everything they had.

One Hundred Muses is not a body of work to them. It's the chapter that holds the rest together. The one that tells the world who they are as artists, before they are anything else.

They're glad they didn't ask for permission.