The abject artefacts of memory: photographs from Cambodia’s genocide

Abstract

This article examines the politics of representation around a 1997 exhibition of Cambodian atrocity photographs that were produced by Khmer Rouge perpetrators during the period 1975-9. I discuss the role of the Tuol Sleng archive in Cambodia, and the work of a private group in the preservation and publication of the prisoner portrait photographs. It is argued that responses of visitors and curators to the photographs, displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, provide significant insights into a contemporary propensity to memorialize, rather than specify and politicize, the past violence of ‘peripheral’ states and peoples.

Mapping Visual Studies in Communication

“…This work analyzes powerful photographs that embody moments in history and that, through recirculation and reappropriation, continue to animate collective memory. Other authors did similar work by studying public exhibitions, such as a Holocaust museum or an exhibit of Cambodian atrocity photographs (Hoskins, 2003;Hughes, 2003). Public displays invite questions about authenticity and the tendency to memorialize rather than politicize past violence.…”

Angels of memory: photography and haunting in Guatemala City

“…For South African, Argentinean, and Cambodian cases, see Bosco (2006), Bouvard (1994), Hughes (2003), Minty (2006). GeoJournal (2008) 73:195-217 207 grown increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of straight documentary photography (interview with the author, San Salvador, El Salvador, 19 September 2007).…”

Through the Looking Blast: Geopolitics and Visual Culture

“…Beyond the everyday nature of televised war, geopolitical violence also works through iconic (visual) forms. The idea that iconic images can work to normalise and neutralise geopolitical violence is by no means new; it is a claim that is still debated in both academic and popular responses to Holocaust and other ‘atrocity’ photographs (see Campbell 2002a,b; Hughes 2003). As far as the current conflict in Iraq is concerned, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photographs are a key case in point.…”