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Cambodians Demand Apology for Khmer Rouge Images with Smiling Faces

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Hundreds of stark black-and-white portraits of terrified people are displayed on large panels in Tuol Sleng, the former Cambodian prison that is now a museum. The portraits stand as a visual symbol of a genocide: The subjects were photographed before they were tortured and put to death under the Khmer Rouge, the fanatical communist regime that, from 1975 to 1979, caused the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians.

Matt Loughrey, an Irish artist who runs a business colorizing old photographs, recently colorized versions of the same portraits found in the prison. In some cases, he altered the images to put smiles on the victims’ faces. In an interview with Mr. Loughrey published last Friday, Vice Media said the colorization was intended to “humanize the tragedy.”

Vice’s publication of the doctored photos caused an outcry from Cambodians worldwide who saw them as a trivialization and desecration of their national tragedy. Vice has since removed the article, but many Cambodians remain shocked by Mr. Loughrey’s treatment of the portraits and have called for an apology.

“The colors do not add humanity to these faces,” said Theary Seng, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge who has written a book about her childhood experiences. “Their humanity is already captured and expressed in their haunting eyes, listless resignation, defiant looks.”

2019 interview with Digital Camera World he said, “I used to answer that question by saying that the brain is designed to see in red, green and blue, which of course it is. However, I think I was attempting to argue or defend this work when really there’s no need to. We either like something or we do not and that’s an essential part of living.”

Mr. Loughrey did not respond to several messages asking for comment on the recent images published by Vice.

The victims in the photographs had been arrested in widespread purges in which the Khmer Rouge leadership, looking for traitors in its midst, devoured itself. Some 18,000 people were imprisoned in Tuol Sleng, by an updated count. Victims were brought blindfolded into prison and the pictures were taken moments after the blindfolds were pulled from their faces.

“Imagine the terror they felt,” said Rithy Panh, an award-winning Cambodian documentary filmmaker whose relatives died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. “When the Khmer Rouge photographers took off their blindfolds, the first thing the victims saw was the camera and sometimes the flash of the flashbulb. That is the first act of the killing. From that moment on they were only numbers.”

In an interview before he died in 2011, Vann Nath, one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng, said many of the victims had been starved for a week or beaten before the pictures were taken. Many had never seen a camera before. “These expressions that people empathize with are just pure shock from the flash,” he said.

When journalists and art critics write about the photographs, they tend to focus on the victims’ expression as an indictment of Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, said Mr. Vann Nath. “But this is all in their imagination,” he said. “They have no clue.”

Many of the photographs were taken by Nhem En, a village boy who was chosen at the age of 15 to be an official photographer at Tuol Sleng. He was sent to China to learn photographic techniques and many of his pictures are technically beautiful.

After the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion, the pictures lay moldering and unattended in drawers inside the prison until 1993. That year, two young photographers, Chris Riley and Douglas Niven, cleaned and archived 6,000 negatives in return for the right to publish 100 of them in a book called The Killing Fields.

Although the photographs were intended as identification mug shots to be attached to the biographies of the prisoners, they have since been presented in different guises, as historical artifacts, as legal evidence and as art.

A selection of 22 of the photographs was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997 — perfectly framed and perfectly lit.

Reporting was contributed by Ros Sampoeu in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

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Filed Under: WORLD Tagged With: Archives and Records, Art, Business, Cambodia, China, Family, Khmer Rouge, Leadership, Media, Murders, Attempted Murders and Homicides, Museum of Modern Art, Museums, National, New York, Phnom Penh (Cambodia), Pol Pot, Political Prisoners, War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

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