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.