“Vice published altered photos showing Cambodian genocide victims smiling. It unleashed an uproar.” (The Washington Post)

This article, published in the Washington Post, looks at a recent controversial decision by Vice Media to publish digitally altered photographs of individuals that died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. On April 9, 2021, Vice Asia published a piece titled, “These People Were Arrested by the Khmer Rouge and Never Seen Again,” which included never-before-published manipulated headshots of victims of Tuol Sleng prison, as well as an interview with their creator, Matthew Loughrey. These images were digitally colorized and altered to portray the subjects as smiling, decisions Loughrey claimed “humanize[d] the tragedy.” This article states that Loughrey altered the images without the consent of the victim’s family members, though other sources, like an article in the Khmer Times, reported that Loughrey stated that there were “11 [families] that requested their relative to smile.” The release of these photographs sparked immediate backlash from all spheres of discourse — the Cambodian news media, the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the general public on Twitter and other social media, and from other artists as well. Two days after their publication, Vice Media removed the article and issued a public apology the following day, stating that the photographs were “manipulated beyond colorization” and that the article “did not meet the editorial standards of VICE.”

Reading about this story is not only incredibly infuriating, but painful too. Probably the most harmful and offensive claim by Loughrey is that his edits “humanize[d] the tragedy” experienced by the victims of the Khmer Rouge. It suggests that somehow the people in these photographs, void of color and peace, lack humanity. It proposes that to colorize, to bring these images into the modern, is to humanize them. But there is not an absence of humanity in these images as they stand. The problem is the inability of people like Loughrey to see that humanity. In fact, by creating these false smiles, he strips those people of their humanity, their ability to control the expression of experience with their bodies.

Many of the Cambodians I’ve spoken to take great issue with the management of the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum. When the site opened up as a museum, it didn’t attract tourists. Most of its visitors were Cambodians who had come to search the thousands of photographed faces on display for anyone they might recognize. My parents made a trip to this museum in 1992, just as the country was opening up again. My mother described to me that she looked at every single image to make sure her father, who was captured by Khmer Rouge soldiers and never seen again by our family, was not among the photographed. When she didn’t find him there, she left, and never returned to the museum again. The offense I’ve heard taken repeatedly by Cambodians is not related to the display of the photographs themselves, but that the museum as an institution now caters towards tourists. It is performative and exhibitionary, not a site that honors the deceased in any way that is legible to the Khmer people, especially those who survived the genocide. In “Imagined Communities,” Benedict Anderson talks about the museum as a colonialist institution. I’m curious to explore if any of his ideas can be used to frame the origin of Tuol Sleng as a museum, taking into consideration that it was established by the Vietnamese government to legitimize its presence in Cambodia after driving out the Khmer Rouge.