Hughes I

The abject artefacts of memory: photographs fromCambodias genocide

Rachel HughesUNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

The mass political violence which occurred between 1975 and 1979 in PolPots Cambodia, then known as the state of Democratic Kampuchea, hasbeen variously memorialized both inside and outside Cambodia. Thisarticle interrogates a 1997 exhibition of portrait photographs held in NewYork and widely received as a memorialization of the Cambodiangenocide. These photographs were originally produced by Pol Pots secretpolice in the largest prison of Democratic Kampuchea, known as S-21.

The S-21 prisoner portrait photographs have been exhibited in institu-tional locations worldwide since 1994. The 1997 exhibition at New YorksMuseum of Modern Art (hereafter MoMA), titled Photographs from S-21:19751979, generated significant debate both in published reviews and inunpublished visitor comments books which MoMA had installed in theexhibition space. For the purposes of this article I principally examinepublished reviews, academic analyses, visitor book responses and publicstatements of the co-instigators of the exhibition (the Photo Archive Groupand the MoMA Department of Photography). In addition, I draw onobservations made in Cambodia, and on interview comments of Cambodianand non-Cambodian key-players associated with the Tuol Sleng Museumof Genocide Crimes in Cambodia, the home institution of the S-21 prisonerportrait negatives. The subject of this article is part of a larger researchproject which examines sites in contemporary Cambodia that memorializethe traumatic events and experiences of Democratic Kampuchea. Thisresearch also examines how and why these memorial sites are populardestinations for non-Cambodian tourists. This larger project relies uponanalysis of documentary sources, key-player interviews, and observations atthe Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes and the Choeung Ek Centre

Media, Culture & Society 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaksand New Delhi), Vol. 25: 2344[0163-4437(200301)25:1;2344;029632]

for Genocide Crimes in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. During interviews in2000 with Western tourists at Tuol Sleng Museum, I was surprised by thesignificant number of tourists who professed a familiarity with the S-21prisoner photographs. Few could recall exactly where they had first seenthe portraits, but were adamant that their contact with the images hadoccurred prior to their arrival in Cambodia. These comments sparked myinterest in how and why the portrait photographs have become theundisciplined envoys of Cambodias traumatic past, circulating on a globalscale and through various media.

I wish to explore the various and ambiguous origins, trajectories andeffects of the exhibition Photographs from S-21: 19751979 as an ex-locusmemorial event. I begin with a discussion of the production of the portraitsand their passage, following the fall of Democratic Kampuchea, into aCambodian national museum and archive as evidence of the genocide,where they have remained from 1979 to the present day. I examine theassistance given to the museum and archive in 1994 by a private,non-Cambodian, non-profit organization, and the subsequent removal fromCambodia of a number of photographic prints under the auspices of thisorganization. The organization offered the prints for exhibition to numerousgalleries in North America, Europe and Australia. MoMA selected a smallnumber of prints for the 1997 exhibition. I argue that the removal of thephotographs from Cambodia was enabled by contemporary, internation-alized discourses of humanitarian intervention and cultural memory, sub-tended by specific cultural-geographical imaginaries. By examining theformal and informal responses to a specific visual medium a Western art-museum exhibition I raise various questions about the politics ofownership and curatorship of objects within the study of media andmemory.

Memory, sovereignty and the archive

The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes is located in the Cambodiancapital, Phnom Penh. The museum occupies the site of S-21, the largestand most sophisticated detention and interrogation camp of DemocraticKampuchea. The museum, overseen by the Cambodian Ministry of Cultureand Fine Arts, is considered a reminder not only of Cambodias recenthistory, but of the inhumanity that sometimes overwhelms ordinary humanbeings (Genocide Museum: Tuol Sleng visitor brochure, 1999: 6). As partof its permanent exhibition, the museum displays thousands of photo-graphic portraits of prisoners produced between 1975 and 1979 by thedocumentation sub-unit of S-21.

The portrait photographs, taken of every incoming S-21 prisoner, wereused primarily for identification purposes within the facility. Important

24 Media, Culture & Society 25(1)

prisoners, including officials of the former regime and high-ranking KhmerRouge cadres purged by their own party, were also photographed afterdeath. Single copies of these photographs, along with confession docu-ments, were forwarded to the collective leadership, or upper brothers, ofDemocratic Kampuchea who were not directly involved in running S-21(Chandler, 1999: 27). Photographs of less important individuals werepresumably also attached to their confessions in the internal operation ofthe prison. Confessions were extracted under duress or torture in thepursuit of strings or networks of traitors (khsae kbot) which theleadership believed threatened the entire revolutionary state (Chandler,1999: 6). The meticulous production of the prisoner portraits was animportant element of administrative control. While the experience of beingphotographed undoubtedly intimidated prisoners, it is also imaginable thatthis repeated submission of individuals to identification, the extensivephoto archive produced and portrait photographs in circulation in the prisonserved to reinforce the total institution (see Chandler 1999: 1440). Thephotographs were, for both prisoners and their masters, emblems of theregimes omnipotence and efficiency.

A significant store of S-21 documentation was discovered at theabandoned prison site by incoming Vietnamese forces during the fall ofDemocratic Kampuchea in January 1979. The site was rapidly reconfiguredas a museum of genocide under the new Vietnamese-aided state, knownas the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea. Curatorial assistance came from aVietnamese museum expert, Mai Lam, who wanted the site to help[Cambodians] study the war and many aspects of war crimes (quoted inChandler, 1999: 8). S-21 became an historical site and an exhibition space,opening to the general public as the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in1980 (Tuol Sleng was a pre-1975 name for the area). Documents,including thousands of confessions, internal memos, photographic printsand thousands of prisoner portrait photo negatives were subsequentlymaintained in the archive located in Building B of the museum. Theinstallation of the prisoner portraits in the Tuol Sleng Museum and archivemarked the beginning of their consideration as institutional materialscapable of evidencing genocide, drawing audiences from further afield thanPhnom Penh. It is thus important to examine in detail the context providedby Tuol Sleng Museum and archive.

The geopolitical context to the development of Tuol Sleng Museum wasone in which the governments of the United States and its anti-Vietnameseallies were publicly denouncing Vietnams incursion into Cambodia as aninvasion of one sovereign state by another. As a result, these global powerscontinued to recognize and support the Khmer Rouge as the legitimateauthority of Cambodia. Significant international food and medical aid at thedisposal of these governments was not extended to the Peoples Republicof Kampuchea. The situation was justified by a continued opposition to

25Hughes, The abject artefacts of memory

Vietnams original military incursion, the Vietnamization perceived to beunder way in the country, and Soviet bloc support for the PeoplesRepublic, despite mass media and scholarly exposure of the Cambodiangenocide (see Evans and Rowley, 1990; Klintworth, 1989; Vickery, 1999).Long-term national and international legitimacy of the Peoples Republicof Kampuchea hinged on the exposure of the violent excesses of Pol Potexemplified by S-21 and the continued production of a coherent memory ofthe past, that is, of liberation and reconstruction at the hands of abenevolent fraternal state (see Hughes, forthcoming; Ledgerwood, 1997).Hundreds of foreign journalists, aid organization representatives, churchgroups and other non-government delegations visited Tuol Sleng Museumduring the early 1980s, reporting in press or in anecdote their convictionsthat extreme, orchestrated violence had indeed occurred under Pol Pot.Such visits to the museum were required and organized by the relevantauthorities of the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea, and did not involveany detailed viewing of the Museums Building B archive.

The Tuol Sleng archive, as an important repository of historical materialsof the Democratic Kampuchea period, has been central to historicalanalysis and Cambodian cultural politics in the post-1979 period. Thearchive provided Cambodian researchers and curators associated with TuolSleng Museum with significant insights into Democratic Kampuchea.These insights have been variously incorporated into local scholarshistorical and political analyses, state press agency publications, as well asthe museums display.

Foreign observers of Cambodia were especially interested in the TuolSleng archive from 1979 onwards as they attempted to make sense of whathad happened during Cambodias isolation under Pol Pot, and the new stateof the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea. As a visiting scholar, WilliamShawcross was able to view the archive during his 1980 visit to Tuol SlengMuseum. He later described the visit to Tuol Sleng in some detail, butcommented that access to the archive was increasingly restricted(Shawcross, 1984: 40). Further, Shawcross declared that there was neitherWestern interest nor support from the Vietnamese experts in Cambo-dia in establishing or remembering what happened. He wrote that:

[I]n significant ways it seemed by 1983 that propaganda threatened to bury thereal and dreadful history of the recent past so deeply under new lies, newexaggerations, new ideological contraptions, that it was in danger of beingobliterated and thus forgotten. (Shawcross, 1984: 3601)

Journalist Elizabeth Becker, writing in The Washington Post on 28 Februaryand 1 March 1983, claimed that the Tuol Sleng archive was in fact closedto foreign scholars, inferring that the new government included remnantKhmer Rouge and the archive was effectively hiding details of presentgovernment members participation in the atrocities of the former regime.


Michael Vickery, in his book Cambodia 19751982 (first published in1984) countered that Becker was completely mistaken in this claim(Vickery, 1999: 312). Vickery maintained that every qualified foreignresearcher has been given a virtual carte blanche to examine [the archiveddocuments] and that Becker herself had copied from dossiers there(Vickery, 1999: 312).

It is evident from these exchanges that the Tuol Sleng archive wasconsidered by foreign scholars to be key to history and memory work inCambodia. The archive was held by various groups to indicate the generalpolitical openness (or otherwise) of the new government and, importantly,its willingness to investigate and memorialize the past. Cambodia watch-ers who were most critical of Vietnams involvement in Cambodiaassumed that the archive contained information pertaining to the politicalgenealogy of individuals now central to the new government, that is,information linking these figures with Khmer Rouge violence. The accusa-tion was that the archive held information these individuals wantedforgotten. The heralded obliteration of the past was not borne out bydevelopments at the archive or elsewhere in Cambodia during the early1980s or in the years following. Two crucial memorial undertakings of thePhnom Penh government in 1983 an annual 20 May Day of Angercommemoration and the construction of local-level memorials to thevictims gave the lie to Shawcrosss heralding of amnesia in the PeoplesRepublic of Kampuchea. Although these two features of memorializationwere politicized and thus were largely dismissed by Western commenta-tors as propaganda exercises (see Becker, 1984: 45; Martin, 1994: 237) they have been popularly adapted and maintained throughout Cambodia tothe present day.

Human rights activist David Hawk researched in the Tuol Sleng archiveduring the early 1980s. His experience was one of patience, cooperationand assistance on the part of the Tuol Sleng Museum and archive stafftoward his work (Hawk, 1982). A further indication of the willingness ofthe Cambodian government to facilitate access to the archive came in theearly 1990s with the granting of permission and assistance to CornellUniversity to carry out a massive project of document preservation andmicrofiche copying at a number of archives in Phnom Penh. After morethan two years of work, the project resulted in one set of microfiche copiesfor the archive and one that was installed in Cornell University Library.The Cornell project did not copy the extensive photographic materials inthe archive. The main reason for this was that David Hawk had createdback-up negatives of the photographic materials in the S-21 archive duringhis time there in the early 1980s, copies he later donated to Cornellscollection (Ledgerwood, personal communication, 2002). In sum, the figureof the Tuol Sleng archive was harnessed to various scholarly theories as to


how the past was (mis)represented during the Peoples Republic ofKampuchea, both to Cambodians and internationally.

Jacques Derrida has argued that the archive takes place at the disintegra-tion point of the very memory it seeks to preserve (Derrida, 1996: 11). Thisis true for Tuol Sleng Museum and archive, which dwell in the very placewhere it is most evident that Democratic Kampuchea is now gone, that is,is now history. Disintegration of the memory of Democratic Kampucheaalso results from the museum and archive being turned toward aninternational audience, where they have been met by the eroding forces ofboth denial and interest. While the Tuol Sleng archive, like every archive,assures particular possibilit[ies] of memorisation, of repetition, of re-production (Derrida, 1996: 11), it perpetuates an instability also noted byDerrida. Installed within the archive is repetition compulsion, a conditionof repetition and reproduction which constitutes the archive, and is in turnfostered by it. For Derrida, following Freud, repetition compulsion isunderstood as indivisible from the death drive, and the archive allarchives necessarily harbour this destructive, anti-archive archiviolithicintentions (Derrida, 1996: 12). A certain fragility results from this internalcontradiction: right on that which permits and conditions archivisation, wewill never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, andin truth menaces with destruction (Derrida, 1996: 12). In the case of theTuol Sleng archive, this susceptibility has been read as a purely physicalcondition, with much concern about the physical materials of the archive asdamaged and decaying. For non-Cambodians especially, concern about thisliteral condition has led to a perception that a condition of susceptibility isspecific to the Cambodian archive, and is ultimately open to remedy,neither of which is the case.

This situation in part explains non-Cambodian responses to Cambodianmonuments like Tuol Sleng Museum and Tuol Sleng archive. The archiveor monument is seen to hold the true memory of past events, and can act asa rallying point for those who seek the truth. But the physical differenceand deterioration of an archive or a memorial site may distract the visitor,and can be perceived, quite literally, as a lack of memory; for some, a lackof memory is indicative of a cultural incapacity to remember, or evidenceof guilt. This brings me to a crucial point about the archival status of theportrait photographs I am discussing here. They are at once images(supposedly unproblematic, particular, of a real person) and also objects(physical things that have survived actual events as evidence, although theycannot directly show those events). I want to refer to this doubleness ofthe S-21 photographs as artefactual; such an artefact is both image andobject, with all the contradictions that this implies. In the subsequent fateof the S-21 prisoner portrait photographs, it is possible to see how thisinherent contradiction has determined the varied uses to which they have


been put. It is in this context that I turn to the case of the private, UnitedStates-based Photo Archive Group and its work at Tuol Sleng.

Intervention and evacuation: the politics of dislocation

In 1993, two North American photojournalists, Douglas Niven andChristopher Riley, visited the Tuol Sleng Museum and its archive. Onviewing the photographic materials which had not been part of the Cornellproject, Niven and Riley conceived of a specific photographic archive projectfor Tuol Sleng. On being approached by Niven and Riley, the Cambodiangovernment gave permission for a project of cleaning, cataloguing andprinting of the S-21 photographs. Support was forthcoming from varioussources in the United States, including funding from the Lucius and EvaEastman Fund and private individuals, and photographic materials atdiscounted prices from various commercial photographic supplies groups.

The original Project Proposal document of Niven and Rileys PhotoArchive Group stated that the photographic archive was threatened by avolatile political situation, years of neglect, a lack of resources and theabsence of trained staff. The project sought to rescue an endangeredphotographic archive while also providing an opportunity to train Cambo-dians in archive preservation and advanced photographic techniques(Photo Archive Group, 1993). The work of cleaning, indexing and printingsome 6000 original photographic negatives commenced in 1994; 100 of the6000 negatives involved in the project were finally selected to bereproduced in six editions. Negatives were chosen for photographicquality, historical value and to present an accurate cross-section of TuolSlengs victims (Photo Archive Group, no date). Two of the six 100-printeditions produced by the project remained in Cambodia, and the remainingfour editions were brought out of the country for safekeeping (PhotoArchive Group, no date). This safekeeping of the photos is in partattributable to the political uncertainty that followed the UN-sponsoredCambodian national election of May and June of 1993. The Photo ArchiveGroups Project Proposal document (1993) also reports talk by variouspolitical factions of closing Tuol Sleng, though no documented substantia-tion of such talk is cited. Further justifications for safekeeping of thephotographs may have been made in light of reports that S-21 photographshad gone missing early in the life of the museum. David Chandler (1999:170n42) confirms that an unknown number of portrait photographs re-corded in an East German documentary made in the early days of themuseum disappeared some time later. Aside from these disappearances,some 6000 negatives lay in the archive for some 13 years before they wereviewed by Niven and Riley.


The Project Proposal also notes that such a project presented a rare andtimely opportunity to preserve and present to the world a lasting record ofgenocide. Further statements argue that it is impossible to forget thevictims faces and that [i]t is in humanitys interest that they be preservedand seen by as wide an audience as possible (Photo Archive Group, 1993).Lindsay French attests that the primary motivation of Niven and Riley wastheir conviction that the photographs could serve the purpose of drawingviewers closer to their [photographed] subjects and motivate people tobecome aware of the things that happened in Cambodia, and educatethemselves about what is going on there now (French, forthcoming). It isclear that, from the outset of the project, Niven and Rileys aims weretwofold: the revival of the S-21 photographs in-situ; and the circulation ofthe S-21 prisoner portrait images through various media outside theCambodian context. The former intention, to revive the negatives asnationally significant visual records within the museum, displays all thehallmarks of a contemporary humanitarian aid project: an effective re-sponse to an urgent situation which involves local skilling and empower-ment (the training of Cambodians in safeguarding cultural artefacts for thefuture). The second intention to go global with exhibitions and apublication (which involved holding copyright on the photographs) necessarily involved the photographs in the circulations of internationalnews and visual arts media. French reports that, in exchange for theirwork, Niven and Riley were given the rights to 100 images (French,forthcoming). This granting of rights to the images is not noted in thePhoto Archive Groups own Project Proposal (1993) or Project Summary(no date) documents. Neither was any formal arrangement of rightsreported in the local Phnom Penh press (see Peters, 1994). The publicitysurrounding the Photo Archive Group intensified in late 1994 and 1995when the groups work was featured in various print articles and othermedia reports: Time Magazine, Photographers International, The New YorkTimes, See, American Photo, Daily Telegraph (UK), The Age (Australia),Associated Press and Australian Radio. The interest continued throughoutthe following year the British Broadcasting Corporation shot a doc-umentary about the work of the Photo Archive Group which was shown onBritish television in May 1996 (Photo Archive Group, no date). ThePhotographers International and Time features were timed to coincidewith the 20th anniversary of the Khmer Rouges 1975 capture of PhnomPenh in April 1995. In 1996, art and photography publishers Twin Palmsreleased The Killing Fields, a 9 12 inch, casebound text whichreproduced 78 individual portrait photographs. The generation of sympathyfor, and interest in, Cambodias past and present has undoubtedly beenfuelled by the global exposure of the photographs. Crucial questionsregarding this exposure, however, remain under-explored. What sort ofrecognition and interest has been facilitated by the images repeated


exhibition? What representational politics are involved in the continuedcirculation of these images?

Kerwin Lee Klein (2000) has recently characterized the contemporaryacademic and popular concern with memory as a discourse in whichmemory is an essentialized super-category. Klein argues that, despiteclaims to the contrary, the study of memory (as Memory) has beendeployed to covertly restabilize the postmodern and post-structuralistdestabilization of History. In the context of Kleins critique of thecomprehensive trend toward the materialization of memory to identifymemory as a collection of practices or material artefacts it is possible tofurther identify the archive and photographs as part of a memorial tropeinvolving dramatically imperfect piece[s] of material culture that areimbued with pathos:

Such memorial tropes have emerged as one of the common features of our newcultural history where in monograph after monograph, readers confront theabject object: photographs are torn, mementos faded, toys broken. (Klein, 2000:1356)

The veracity of this claim cannot be ignored; the pages of the monographmay equally be the walls of the museum, or the screen of the news report,or other media. The disintegrating archive and the S-21 victim portrait arejust such abject materials, as they are gazed upon by scholars, photogra-phers, readers, viewers and visitors.

The figure of the portrait photograph heralds the materialization ofmemory in representations of the Democratic Kampuchea period. Threespecific occurrences of portrait photographs support this thesis. The firstoccurs in the 1984 Warner Brothers film The Killing Fields, directed byRoland Joffe. The film is a unique and detailed portrayal of Cambodiabetween 1973 and 1980, and was responsible for alerting audiencesworldwide to the Cambodian genocide. An early section of the film depictsthe April 1975 fall of Phnom Penh to Khmer Rouge forces and thesubsequent detention of foreigners in the French Embassy in Phnom Penhprior to their evacuation from Cambodia. In the embassy, Americanjournalist Sydney Schanberg and others attempt to have their Cambodiancounterpart, Dith Pran, included in the evacuation from Cambodia. Theirclaims for asylum and hopes for diplomatic influence become impotentfictions. They attempt to forge a foreign passport for Dith Pran, for which aportrait photograph is taken. Standard chemicals for the development of thephotographic negative are, however, unavailable. One after another thephotographs fade to overexposed pieces of photographic card. The fadingphotograph symbolizes the foreigners inability to safeguard their Cambo-dian friends, families and colleagues. The blank photograph forewarns ofPrans impending subjection to the obliterating exigencies of the newKhmer Rouge state.


Although Niven and Riley were concerned with photographic qualitywhen they chose their 100 negatives for printing, a number of faded, watermarked and scratched photographs are among the 78 individual portraitsreproduced in their book, The Killing Fields (1996). Ghostly shapes andpresences appear in these plates, blotting out the side of a face, coilingaround the edge of an image, or strewing a strange starry wash of lightsacross an otherwise underexposed image. Such images often receivespecific attention from audiences, who welcome the atmospheric effects asrelief from the intentional, technically perfect image. For explication of theportraits reproduced in The Killing Fields, the book relies on an essay byDavid Chandler and the recollections of S-21 survivor Vann Nath asrecorded by Sara Colm.

One other important portrait is discussed but not reproduced in Nivenand Rileys book. Vann Naths testimony of the physical and psychologicalbrutality of incarceration at S-21 is followed by the tale of his escape fromcertain death on account of his artistic skills. Shifted from prisoner toprison-worker, Vann Nath was first employed to paint portraits of Pol Pot(apparently as part of a plan by Brother Number One for a cult ofpersonality late in the Democratic Kampuchea period). For this task, VannNath worked from a portrait photograph of Pol Pot, about which he hascommented:

Pol Pots face looked smooth and calm. But the feeling in my heart was that hewas very savage and evil. I wondered how he could look so pleasant and yettreat people so cruelly. (Vann Nath in Niven and Riley, 1996: 100, see alsoVann Nath, 1998: 59)

Furthermore, Vann Nath has written in his own autobiography that heconsidered this portrait photograph to reveal Pol Pot to be not-Khmer, thatis, racially and culturally foreign.

[W]as he a Khmer person? With such an appearance and complexion, he couldbe Chinese. (Vann Nath, 1998: 59)

In these various representations of Cambodias recent past, the motif of adisappearing or disappeared portrait may be traced. These forms evidencethe transnational and transcultural trade in the abject artefact of the past asmemory itself; this is a trade facilitated by a revival of primordialism(Klein, 2000: 144) largely Western designations of the susceptibility,singularity and humanitarian potential located in the non-West.

The public knowledge of the S-21 photographs is inextricably linked tothe activities of the Photo Archive Group. The history of the photographsis narrowed to those details emerging from the Photo Archive Group.Many such reports assert that Niven and Riley discovered the negatives inCambodia, a framing of the photographs which dismisses the prior (if


limited) curatorial handling. This narrative of discovery lends a certainheroism to Niven and Rileys actions, which contrasts dramatically withthe anti-heroism and victimhood of the S-21 prisoners. Niven and Rileysown Project Proposal constructs Cambodia as threatened by politicalvolatility, as neglected and endangered (Photo Archive Group,1993). The Project Proposal promises a techno-bureaucratic transformationof the current archives chaos into order, an arrest of decay, and theproduction of a permanent set of clean, archived copies to be located inCambodia and, importantly, elsewhere. Within the imagined geography ofpowerful nations and their citizens, genocide occurs on (and against) theterritory of humanity, and indicates, when geopolitically convenient, newcultural and moral peripheries. While the root cause of the violence isconsidered endemic to Cambodia or Cambodian-ness, the instructivevalue of evidence of a genocide to other audiences is seen to transcendlocal (Cambodian) institutional concerns. Giorgio Agamben diagnoses thecontemporary world as one in which human life is divided into disen-franchised, depoliticized bare life and subject-citizens with political life.Agamben argues, furthermore, that humanitarian endeavours only grasphuman life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despitethemselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought tofight (Agamben, 1998: 133). As such, artefacts like the S-21 portraits,which are both representations and residues of bare life, develop a curiousstatus as heritage artefacts of global interest and cultural memory.

In Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng photo archive project is considered bysome as having wrongly wrested control of the artefacts (and their use)from Cambodians. One prominent Cambodian researcher, Youk Chhang,has expressed his frustration about the generic nature of the work of thePhoto Archive Group. He argues that the initial, specific focus of theproject to assist in the preservation of a national archive of Cambodia has been overtaken by other priorities:

This is the photograph of Tuol Sleng, it is the history of Cambodia, andeveryone should have access equally. (Youk Chhang, personal communication,2000)

An alternative scenario for the use of the S-21 photographs was recentlyprovided by Phnom Penh-based artist Ly Daravuth, with assistance fromYouk Chhang. Lys installation, Messengers, was shown as part of a groupshow he co-curated in January 2000 in Phnom Penh, titled The legacy ofabsence: a Cambodian story. The work comprised numerous photographicportraits of young Cambodians. The physical condition of the photographs,their colouring, composition and their subject matter solemn, black-clothedgirls and boys of various ages are immediately recognized as S-21 prisonerportraits. These are portraits of children taken during the Democratic


Kampuchea period, but those depicted were not prisoners of S-21. Theseare portraits of children who were used to run messages between variouslocal cadres for the regime, known as angkar (the organization). Inter-spersed with these photographs are photographs of children living inpresent-day Cambodia, whose portraits were taken by Ly. These photo-graphs were composed and doctored so as to mimic the appearance of thehistorical photographs. Messengers questions the truth-claims made aboutvictim photographs and documents from the Democratic Kampuchea periodin contemporary Cambodia. In a cultural context in which images of S-21victims are well known and charged with considerable emotion, Ly seeksto interrupt the immediate recognition of victimhood. Exhibiting thehistorical photographs of the child messengers, whose identities aresuggested only in the title of the work (and given in the exhibitioncatalogue), reminds viewers that the genocidal regime photographed itsfaithful cadres as well as its incarcerated enemies. The installationquestions the designation of victim-survivor status, especially by non-Cambodians of Cambodians, but also by Cambodians of themselves:

For the young who come after and have no direct connection to such terribleevents, the images of what happened can become the vocabulary by which toconstruct that all too seductive position of I am Cambodian and therefore avictim. (Ly and Muan, 2000)

Ly Daravuth and Ingrid Muan observe that some Cambodian artists whowere very young during the Democratic Kampuchea period investigatewithout reverence what it means to live in partial memories (Ly andMuan, 2000). In addition to this work, Ly and Muan note work in whichrefusing to testify is offered up as a way of living with the past. Little suchspace is opened for any of these memorializing stratagems the refusal ofvictimhood, the refusal to testify, or the active questioning of the truth-artefact in the MoMA exhibition.

MoMA and zones of affect

Twenty-two S-21 prisoner portraits went on public display at the Museumof Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in May 1997. The exhibition, titledPhotographs from S-21: 19751979 was curated by the MoMA Departmentof Photography. It was mounted in Gallery Three, a smaller galleryconfigured as a place where visitors may pause to sit and read, to rest andreflect (MoMA, 1997a). Two lounges and a low table at the centre ofGallery Three provided those viewing Photographs from S-21 with theopportunity to sit, write comments and read from various books (includingNiven and Rileys aforementioned book The Killing Fields). The exhibi-tions wall text provided a brief history of Cambodia 19759 and an


outline of the Niven and Rileys role in bringing the photos to a wideraudience. It read:

When the Communist party, the Khmer Rouge, seized power in April 1975,Cambodia had just concluded five years of a disastrous civil war. Between 1975and 1979, more than 14,000 Cambodians were held captive in S-21, a formerhigh school in the Phnom Penh district of Tuol Sleng. (MoMA, 1997b)

The text confirmed that prisoners had been photographed on arrival atS-21, and that all save seven of those incarcerated and interrogated at S-21had met with brutal execution.

Many visitors and reviewers were prompted to view the MoMAexhibition in light of events unfolding in Cambodia simultaneously, andreported worldwide. In July 1997, Cambodias coalition government led byFirst Prime Minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, and second PrimeMinister, Hun Sen, collapsed into fighting between the partners. Hun Sensconsolidation of power was considered as having undone much of thedemocratic process that had been fostered by the UN transitional authorityin Cambodia some four years earlier (Mydans, 1997). A few weeks laterglobal news media screened extraordinary video footage of Pol Pot himself,alive in western Cambodia. The video showed the former leader being puton trial, denounced and sentenced to life imprisonment by his own remnantKhmer Rouge forces. Two portrait photographs of Pol Pot, one taken in1979 and the other a still from the video, appeared on the front page of TheNew York Times on 29 July 1997. In the context of speculation about a trialof Pol Pot under international law, the S-21 photographs at MoMA wereseen less as tragic reminders of a peripheral past and instead as contempo-rary, crucial evidence. Ironically, commentators in the West were nowtaking up a position on the photographs that had long been held by thePhnom Penh government and the Tuol Sleng Museum. Tuol Sleng (with itsdisplay of thousands of prisoner portrait photographs) and its counterpartsite, the Killing Field of Choeung Ek, had long been considered centres oftypical evidences in Cambodia. Now, almost two decades after theirinitial discovery, the photographs arrival in a major metropolitan museumexhibition was lauded as important and timely (Williams, 1998).

The exhibition space for Photographs from S-21 was, in the words ofone visitor, evocative of a memorial [and] a sacred place. One reviewerexperienced the small squarish room, carpeted, enclosed as being like avault, a crypt (Nahas, 1997). Another wrote of the exhibition as a space inwhich it felt as if a memorial service [wa]s taking place (OSullivan,1997). These references, made in only in passing, belie an importantconsideration of earlier functions of the collections of cultural artefacts andmuseums. According to Shelton (1994: 181), Renaissance collections ofNew World curiosities, like the great medieval churches that were filledwith sacred remains, served to contribute to the fame and reputation of


Europe. Later, European colonialism and the personal fortunes andambitions of imperial and New World-settler collectors also generatedmuseum-mausoleums of plants, animals, human remains and ritual objects(see Elsner, 1994; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Stewart, 1994). As Clifford(1997: 197) argues, the long history of exotic displays in the Westprovides a context of enduring power imbalance within and against whichthe contact work of travel, exhibition and interpretation occurs. Suchmuseum traditions urge consideration of the MoMA exhibition as acontact zone in which the museums organising structure as a collectionbecomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship (Clifford,1997: 192). Like colonial spoils, the photographs from S-21 are of exotictemporal, geographical and cultural origin (year zero Cambodia, theCambodian genocide) and of unknown authorship and function. Theirremoval from Cambodia and appearance at MoMA was primarily due tothe actions of two individual, expert collectors.

In addition to news of events in Cambodia in mid-1997, the exhibitionitself generated heated debate in New York liberal arts circles. GuyTrebays review in Village Voice was least sympathetic of all reviews of theexhibition. Trebay openly criticized Niven and Riley for their decision tosell art-quality prints from the Tuol Sleng archive, and to hold copyrightover the images. Trebays criticism did not reflect well on the S-21exhibition or MoMA itself, which had purchased a small number of theportraits on display in 1995. His review asks:

Who are the people in the Tuol Sleng photos? Who are their families? What isthe role of our own amnesiac culture in the atrocities that took place in a formerpublic high school and beyond it in the killing fields? (Trebay, 1997: 34)

It is true that Photographs from S-21 failed to recall the interconnectednessof Cambodias modern history and that of the United States. For example,the opening sentence of the wall text and press release accompanying theexhibition stated simply: [I]n April 1975, Cambodia had just concludedfive years of a disastrous civil war. No mention was made of the fact thatthis civil war was a conflict gravely exacerbated by the secret bombingcampaigns visited on Cambodia by the United States during the later stagesof its war in Vietnam, and by concurrent United States support for thecorrupt Lon Nol regime in Phnom Penh, against which the Khmer Rougewere able to rally a significant section of the countrys population(Chandler, 1991, 1996; Kiernan, 1989, 1996; Vickery, 1999). It was notMoMAs intention, however, to provide visitors with a political history ofSoutheast Asia within which to couch the S-21 photos. The curators wishedto present the S-21 photographs as a relatively unmediated exhibition ofnon-mainstream works and argued that there were clear precedents for sucha curatorial approach. MoMA had previously exhibited works from otherviolent contexts: Gilles Peres photographs of the 1994 violence in


Rwanda; a show of overt political art entitled The Path of Resistance; and ashow representing post-1960 works which critically explored ideas ofcounter-monuments and memory. In the view of MoMAs senior curator ofphotography, Susan Kismaric, the presentation of Photographs from S-21,like those other exhibitions, functioned as bearing witness to violations ofcivility and human rights (Kismaric, personal communication, 2001). Sheconsidered the controversy around Photographs from S-21 to have arisenfrom a schism between vernacular photography and an aestheticphotographic-arts tradition (Kismaric, personal communication, 2001; Kis-maric quoted in Trebay, 1997). The assistant curator in the Department ofPhotography with principal responsibility for Photographs from S-21,Adrienne Williams, considered the images as belong[ing] in a museum,inviting, sorrowful and very striking (Williams, 1997, 1998).

Like the formal, published reviews of Photographs from S-21, visitors tothe exhibition were moved to record impassioned, personal comments inthe visitor books provided. Some comments address co-visitors, others aredirected towards the exhibitions curators, and some are explicitly self-addressing. Visitors debated historical events, individual and state actions,and specific notions of justice, memory and moral responsibility. Somecomments suggest a deliberate visit to the exhibition, while other visitorsreport coming upon the exhibition in the course of larger exploration of thephotography galleries. Most visitors considered the photographs to be morethan documentary evidence. People wrote of the images as providing a wayof seeing an otherwise unseen history. Many termed the photographs artin a wholly positive sense, as something which enables greater considera-tion and understanding of events and emotions. Like Trebay, however,other responses questioned the appropriateness of Photographs from S-21.For some of this mind, the inappropriateness of the exhibition was due toinsufficient contextualization of the images. Such comments were oftenconfrontational in tone, accusing the curators of exploitation:

I dont believe MoMA had the intention to completely objectify these terribleimages, but this mute and neutral exhibition does that in the coldest possibleway. . . . As a child of Holocaust survivors, I feel that this kind of behavior is atbest indicative of a smugness and an intellectual laziness AT WORST IT ISINHUMANE. (capitals in original)

Others considered the photographs as worthy of exhibition but felt thatMoMA, as a bastion of modernist art traditions, was an inappropriatelocation for such an exhibition. One visitor suggested that the exhibitwould be best shown at the offices of the UN, or at the site where theseatrocities took place. MoMA invited a sombre consideration of the S-21photographs as examples of vernacular photography, as a medium capable


of participating in political repression and human rights violations. Con-troversy arose when MoMA was perceived to have violated the already-fraught contact relationship by narrowing the history and thecharacterization (as part of a vernacular body of art) of the photographs.As a result, the curators attracted accusations of a lapse in morality and aviolation of the dead.

Various consistencies and inconsistencies were discernible within thevisitor comments. Four major themes may be noted: the identification ofthe sacred or mystical (unspeakable, ineluctable, inexplicable); the identi-fication of the aesthetic (as [not] art, innocent, tragic, beautiful); anintellectual response (more information needed to contextualize the images,more knowledge needed generally); and an explicitly political response(more care should have been taken by the museum, or it should haveinterfered less; or the exhibition as being symptomatic of an apoliticalcondition at home or in Cambodia/the Third World). It is clear from thesemultiple characterizations that the photographs produced an affectiveexcess. One review considered Photographs from S-21 one of the yearsmost moving exhibitions, a heartbreaking triumph (Nahas, 1997). Thisaffective excess, experienced as the memorialization of the victims of S-21instead, as Klein identifies, risks edging into:

. . . the stereotypical identification of the savage and the sacred . . . [as]memorys subaltern status turns upon its affinity to the Hegelian notion ofpeople without history. (Klein, 2000: 137)

Cultural stereotyping and sensationalized reportage flourished in responseto Photographs from S-21; one writer claiming the exhibition staged theneutral gaze of the camera meet[ing] the blank stare of a benightedhumanity (Griffin, 1997). The horror of knowing that each photographedindividual had been brutally executed is displaced on to minor, visibleruptures of bodily integrity seen in the photographs. An example of thelatter is found in the way a number of visitors and reviewers (OSullivan,1997; Pinchbeck, 1997) took particular note of the photograph of the boywhose identification card appears to be pinned into his bare chest. Onequite fantastic response to the exhibition was the writing of a draftscreenplay titled Photographs from S-21 which was forwarded toMoMAs Department of Photography along with a request for the materialassistance. The opening scene of the screenplay is set in a gallery spacehung with the S-21 portraits. After gallery closing time the roomstelevision monitor CLICKS on. Without explanation. The portraitsspontaneously reappear, in rapid succession, on the television monitor, untila portrait of a young woman:

. . . freezes [and] becomes largerAnd larger until just


Her EYES thenThe WHITE background of her photograph fill [sic] the screenThen suddenly everything bursts into WHITE

. . . The framed black and white portraits seem to float in a sea of whiteness.(Soluri and Nolletti Productions, 1999, capitalization in original)

Seeing the gallery as a space haunted by the ghosts of those captured in thephotographs was echoed in some visitor comment-book responses: Its hardto sit here comfortably with all these dead eyes staring.

In his review of Photographs from S-21, the New York Times criticMichael Kimmelman recalls the publication of the workplace identificationphotographs of two Brooklyn police officers charged with a beating andsodomy. Kimmelman did not explicitly comment on the irony of the policeofficers official identification photos being used as mug-shots (that is, inthe place of police-generated suspect identification photos). He went on:We expect somehow to find in these mug-shots, as in any portrait,something true and essential about the subjects, and also argued that evenmug-shots, notwithstanding their basic function as simple IDs, have rootsin artistic conventions as old as the renaissance (Kimmelman, 1997: C12).

Kimmelman remarks upon the flattery and trickery in portraiture, but hestops short of suggesting that the S-21 photographs are aligned to suchtrickery. Instead he comments that the S-21 portraits are tricky to judgeand mute. In his attempt to link portrait traditions and mug-shotphotography Kimmelman misses crucial differences between the two.Unlike portraiture, whose involvement in the technologies of the modernstate is irregular and relatively minor, mug-shots (and here, too, colonialphotographic portraiture) are an explicit technology of intervention andcontrol over both subject-citizens and those from whom all political rightshave been stripped. A mug-shot does not attempt to show what is true andessential; rather it attempts to fix a subjects individuality as criminality.With historical hindsight, and from behind the curatorial lens of MoMAand the Photo Archive Group, the photographs function as reverse mug-shots, for it is the authority behind the lens who we now know occupies theplace of the criminal. Where criminals (or traitors) once were, nowappear victims unjustly subjected to violent deaths.

Many audience members, like Kimmelman, remarked on the mutenessof the S-21 photographs: that the photographic medium prevents thedeceased subject from speaking, or the medium as mirroring the incapacityof the subject to have spoken in the moment in which they were alive andbeing photographed. Reviewer Dominique Nahas observed a mute dignityin the photographs. Bearing witness, others speaking of the crimes of theKhmer Rouge and communication as consultation are all variants of aproblem of speech and speaking associated with the exhibition. A con-sideration of photography as an art of non-intervention whereby the


person who intervenes cannot record [and] the person who is recordingcannot intervene (Sontag, 1973: 1112) is being extended in suchcomments. Not only is it not possible to intervene (when various moralorders might suggest it should not be possible to not intervene), but it isalso being suggested that the person who is being recorded, or whoseimage intervenes, is considered somehow incapable, even outside thephotographic moment, of bearing witness to any past, present or future.Barbie Zelizer, also writing of the difficulties of viewing photographs ofatrocity in order to bear witness to such events, argues that photographymay function most directly to achieve what it ought to have stifled atrocitys normalisation (Zelizer, 1998: 212).

The curators at MoMA could not have communicated (and presumablywould not have wished to communicate) directly with the original KhmerRouge photographer/s. Nevertheless, the authorship and ownership of thephotographs (and to a lesser extent the identity of the 22 victims) wereissues that dogged the MoMA exhibition. In the same months thatPhotographs from S-21 was showing in New York, a man claiming to havebeen the chief photographer at S-21, Nhem En, gave a series of interviewsto international journalists in Phnom Penh (McDowell, 1997; Smith, 1997).In Cambodia, Nhem En returned to the S-21 site and viewed the portraitphotos now displayed in the Tuol Sleng Museum. According to a report inthe Wall Street Journal in September 1997, Nhem En, in interviews withforeign journalists:

. . . offered only one careful detail to set the record straight: The number on thechest of the shirtless boy, whose picture is frequently reproduced in the West,wasnt pinned to his skin [but] stuck . . . laminated in plastic, to the boysclammy skin for the few seconds it took to take the picture. (Smith, 1997)

The truth about the number being pinned or unpinned is unknowable and,of course, in the scheme of a genocide, irrelevant. In Nhem Ens reportedarticulation, however, the record the visual and iconic truth of thephotograph which he aims to expose as a fiction is itself unmasked as acomplex play of representation, interpretation and counter-representation.

The MoMA curators sought clarification of Nhem Ens authorship of thephotographs by contacting Peter Maguire, one of the historians with whomNiven and Riley had previously collaborated. Nhem En has subsequentlybeen interviewed by historians David Chandler and Peter Maguire, andPhoto Archive Group co-founder Doug Niven (Chandler, 1999: 278).Significant new information about the use and production of the photo-graphs has been offered by Nhem En in interviews, but his claim toauthorship of the photographs has not resulted in any public recognitionappearing with the work. The other names not recorded on the walls ofGallery Three are those of pictured prisoners identified by historians and


the Photo Archive Group. Facsimile copies of five portraits included in thefinal exhibition were forwarded by the Photo Archive Group to MoMAwith the names we have (Riley, 1997). To my knowledge, these nameswere not included in the exhibition.

The exhibition Photographs from S-21 engaged New York audienceswith images connected with a relatively little known atrocity in comparisonto the European Holocaust, or more recent events in the ex-Yugoslavia. Butthe museum also received criticism from visitors for presenting suchartefacts as if it were simply necessary and desirable (in a moral orpractical sense). It seems that visitors, not curators, struggled most withquestions such as Whose memory is this?, What form of memory? andHow might these photographs be exhibited? Suggestions that the S-21photographs could have been recontextualized through the provision ofmaps, authority statements, or the involvement of diasporic Khmer commu-nities are, however, equally problematic. The MoMA exhibition is notsimply a case of images being removed from the sites in which theirtestimony has meaning.

If, as Klein (2000) suggests, the scholarly obsession with memory hasled to a dangerous designation of memory as structural and material,then this is a particularly salient point for the study of media and memory.For media such as photography, journalism and museum curatorshipnecessarily engage with materiality. But this materiality is, as we have seenin the photographic artefact, inevitably a function of doubleness, simulta-neously image and object, fact and representation. As Ian Buruma argues,it is possible to support the aim of fostering tolerance and understandingof other cultures and communities while opposing the steady substitutionof political argument with the soothing rhetoric of healing (Buruma, 1999:9). But the S-21 photographs, their history already narrowed and over-determined, arrived in a metropolitan art space which too readily gesturedtoward humanitarian sensibilities supposedly above public political con-testation.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Anna Reading and Jane M. Jacobs for their comments on earlierdrafts of this paper. I wish to thank Susan Kismaric, Sarah Hermanson and RachelCrognale at the MoMA Department of Photography for their time, thoughts andassistance during my visit to MoMA in JanuaryFebruary 2001. This research hasbeen made possible by the support of the School of Anthropology, Geography andEnvironmental Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and theDocumentation Centre of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.


References

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D.Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Becker, E. (1983a) Cycle of Poverty, The Washington Post 28 Feb.: 1.Becker, E. (1983b) New Rulers Obscure Role of Party Under Pol Pot, The

Washington Post 1 March: 1. Becker, E. (1984) Kampuchea in 1983: Further from Peace, Asian Survey 24(1):

3748.Buruma, I. (1999) The Joys and Perils of Victimhood, The New York Review 8

April: 49.Chandler D.P. (1991) The Tragedy of Cambodian History: War, Politics and

Revolution since 1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Chandler, D.P. (1996) Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays 19711994.

Sydney: Allen & Unwin.Chandler, D.P. (1999) Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pots Secret

Prison. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.

Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Elsner, J. (1994) A Collectors Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir

John Soane, pp. 15576 in J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds) Cultures ofCollecting. London: Reaktion Books.

Evans, G. and K. Rowley (1990) Red Brotherhood at War: Vietnam, Laos andCambodia since 1975. London: Verso.

French, L. (forthcoming 2002) Exhibiting Terror, in Representation and HumanRights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Genocide Museum: Tuol Sleng visitor brochure (1999).Griffin, T. (1997) Photographs from S-21: 19751979, Time Out New York 411

September: 50.Hawk, D. (1982) Letter to Ung Pech (Director, Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide),

Documentation Center of Cambodia: D06358.Hughes, R. (forthcoming 2002) Nationalism and Memory at the Tuol Sleng

Museum of Genocide Crimes, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in K. Hodgkin and S.Radstone (eds) Contested Pasts. London: Routledge.

Kiernan, B. (1989) The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 19691973,Vietnam Generation 1(1): 441.

Kiernan, B. (1996) The Pol Pot Regime: Race Power and Genocide in Cambodiaunder the Khmer Rouge, 197579. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.

The Killing Fields (1994) Warner Brothers (Enigma). Screenplay by B. Robinson;produced by D. Puttnam; directed by R. Joffe.

Kimmelman, M. (1997) Hypnotized by Mug Shots That Stare Back: Are TheyWindows or Mirrors?, The New York Times 27 Aug.: C1 and C12.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums andHeritage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Klein, K.L. (2000) On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,Representations 69: 12750.

Klintworth, G. (1989) Vietnams Intervention in Cambodia in International Law.Canberra: Australian Government Publishing.


Ledgerwood, J. (1997) The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: NationalNarrative, Museum Anthropology 21(1): 8298.

Ly, D. and I. Muan (2000) The Legacy of Absence: A Cambodian Story. PhnomPenh: Reyum Gallery.

Martin, M. (1994) Cambodia, A Shattered Society, trans. M.W. McLeod. Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California Press.

McDowell, R. (1997) Lens Captures Khmer Rouge Genocide, The Bangkok Post7 Feb.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (1997a) Gallery Three (internal document)April.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (1997b) Photographs from S-21: 19751979(wall text and press release) May.

Mydans, S. (1997) Cambodian Chief Puts on Show of Government as Usual, NewYork Times 29 July.

Nahas, D. (1997) Haunting Images of Impending Death, The Critical State ofVisual Art in New York Review 15 June: 12.

Niven, D. and C. Riley (1996) The Killing Fields. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms.O Sullivan, S. (1997) Critics Choice: Photo, Daily News 28 June.Peters, G. (1994) Restoration Project Immortalises Haunting Images of S-21, The

Cambodia Daily 12 Oct.: 16.Photo Archive Group (1993) Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Photo Archive

Project Proposal, unpublished.Photo Archive Group (no date) Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Project

Summary, unpublished.Pinchbeck, D. (1997) Jottings of Death in Gallery Three, The New York Observer

21 July.Riley, C. (1997) Facsimile Communication to Adrienne Williams, MoMA

Department of Photography Files, 21 April.Shawcross, W. (1984) The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern

Conscience. New York: Simon & Schuster.Shelton, A.A. (1994) Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the

Incorporation of the New World, pp. 177203 in J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds)Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books.

Smith, C.S. (1997) Profiting from his Shots of Pol Pots Terror, The Wall StreetJournal 16 Sept.

Soluri and Nolletti Productions (1999) Photographs from S-21, facsimile of draftscreenplay, Department of Photography MoMA Files, 29 July.

Sontag, S. (1973) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Stewart, S. (1994) Death and Life, in that Order, in the Works of Charles Willson

Peale, pp. 20423 in J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds) Cultures of Collecting.London: Reaktion Books.

Trebay, G. (1997) Killing Fields of Vision: Was Cambodias Genocide Just aMoment of Photographic History? The Village Voice 3 June: 34.

Vann Nath (1998) A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer RougesS-21. White Lotus: Bangkok.

Vickery, M. (1999) Cambodia 19751982. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.Williams, A. (1997) Letter to William Dunlap and Linda Burgess, MoMA

Department of Photography Files, 7 July.Williams, A. (1998) Letter to Paul Ellis, MoMA Department of Photography

files, 31 Aug.Zelizer, B. (1998) Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the

Cameras Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Rachel Hughes is a doctoral candidate in Geography at the University ofMelbourne, Australia.Address: School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental StudiesUniversity of Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia[email: [email protected]]
