In 1997, throngs gathered at the Modern Museum of Art (MoMA), in New York, to view a much-contested exhibition of twenty-two black-and-white photographs. Museum visitors met the gaze of nameless subjects frozen in the metallic glow of the gelatin-silver prints. Viewers who wanted to learn the subjects’ identities, where and who produced the images, their purpose, or why the subjects were photographed found only vague placards that read: “Photographer unknown. Untitled. 1975–79. Gelatin-silver print. 14x11.” Were so few political facts known, the historical context so scantly defined that these images could be presented to the public only in a haze of dim anonymity?
Certainly not, asserted the exhibition’s critics: these were ghostly photographic traces that distinctly crystallized Cambodian suffering in the era of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal terror during the late 1970s. The collection’s curated images were mug shots of Cambodian inmates imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, the former top-secret nucleus of the Khmer Rouge’s torture and genocidal operations. Reviewing the MoMA exhibition, Guy Trebay, critic for The Village Voice, acerbically remarked: “The Cambodian dead are held up for consideration in the cool light of formalist concerns” (Trebay quoted in Caswell 74). Isolated from their historical context and displayed for their visually arresting aesthetic value, the Tuol Sleng mug shots were presented as art, not as the political relics of genocide.
Such ethical concerns around the presentation, appropriation, and (de)contextualization of visual records, coupled with the subsequent discursive impact these archival enterprises have on images’ interpretation and social value, are broached in Michelle Caswell’s absorbing study, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Caswell’s monograph assiduously investigates how the assembly, management, and dissemination of digital archive collections (re)shape collective Cambodian memory as the Tuol Sleng mug shots migrate through varying media conduits and social contexts.
In the first chapter, “The Making of Records,” Caswell elucidates the historical evolution of the mug shot genre in Cambodia, deftly drawing on the country’s penal history to illustrate how the mug shot, as a visual discourse, was imported and implemented during French colonial rule. As a protectorate of France, Cambodia was never as entirely inundated by French cultural influence as some other Southeast Asian colonies were, particularly Vietnam; however, says Caswell, “the French had a lasting influence on the Cambodian legal and penal systems” (33).
Most notably, the steady influence of France’s Bertillon system left an indelible trace on Cambodia’s penal system. The eponymous founder, the French police officer Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), fashioned a criminal-classification system based on anthropometric data, which was meticulously collected using calibrated instruments. Bertillon’s system specified that the subject’s “sex; head length; head breadth; length of middle finger, foot, forearm, and little finger; height; and eye color” be precisely recorded and documented on index cards, which were then organized in so-called Bertillon cabinets (35). The visual centerpiece of Bertillon’s system was, of course, the mug shot, including both side- and front-profile images that were displayed on the index cards.
Caswell emphasizes that Bertillon’s system conflated anthropometric practices and discourses of colonial anthropology, drawing particular attention to his Ethnographie Moderne: Les Races Sauvages (1883), which expounded on “the physical characteristics of the people of Africa, South America, and Oceania and included several illustrations of colonial subjects in front and profile view alongside markers measuring their height” (36, 41). Indeed, as a member of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, Bertillon was surely acquainted with the prevailing ethnographic discourses that eddied about Europe’s academic circles. His monograph made a peculiar contribution to the field as it “applied the logic of colonial anthropology inward, toward the ‘undesirable’ element with French society” (41). With rigorous documentation and the visual power harnessed by the mug shot, Bertillon’s system was enthusiastically implemented throughout Europe and parts of the United States.
Conceiving Bertillon’s method as a geographically contained criminal indexing practice, however, would be a pale oversimplification of an otherwise complex and far-reaching system. Within the shadow of French colonial rule, elements of Bertillonage permeated Cambodian’s penal system and became the standard practice for indexing the criminal Cambodian body. Caswell’s thorough research at the National Archive of Cambodia, citing twenty-nine extant Bertillon measurement cards with attending mug shots, reveals that Bertillon’s practices reached Cambodia as early as the 1930s. Remarkably, the mug shots depict not only the subjects’ profiles, but also the Bertillon chair, a specially designed instrument used to enforce posture. Visual evidence documenting that these instruments were utilized suggests that Khmer Rouge administrators conformed rather stringently to Bertillon’s methods and standards for producing the mug shots of Tuol Sleng prisoners.
Caswell frames her discussion of the mug shot as a complexly layered photographic and discursive practice. Rather than facilely positing the mug shot as an ahistorical genre, Caswell presents the genre as a visual discourse with a contested history, tracing its peculiar evolution as it germinated in French criminology, then as it was shaped by colonial anthropology and transmitted to Cambodia through the French empire, where ultimately it shaped Khmer Rouge documentation practices. In this Foucauldian vein, Caswell’s archaeology of the mug shot lucidly traces its historic origins and frames it as a tool of state power.
Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Caswell examines how the Tuol Sleng mug shots have become situated within a web of “power, archival sources, and the creation of historical knowledge” (10). She is particularly interested in how archiving and presenting the Tuol Sleng mug shots as historical records sustains silences. Trouillot posits that there are four critical points that produce silence, which Caswell summarizes: “Not all events are recorded; not all records are incorporated into archives; not all archives are used to tell stories; not all stories are used to write history” (10).
Indeed, what is at stake in these critical moments of producing historical knowledge is the risk of silencing the voices of Cambodian victims who were not documented at Tuol Sleng (there were one hundred and ninety-five other prisons), whose records were either lost or liquidated or who were killed elsewhere and for whom records likely never existed. As Caswell points out, “Even most of those who were executed were killed in rural areas and not processed in prisons. For these victims, the Khmer Rouge left no written record; bones serve as their only material trace” (10). Despite the extant five thousand one hundred and ninety images archivists have catalogued today, the photographic inventory is not exhaustive. The Tuol Sleng mug shots are perpetually haunted by a “host of silences” surrounding victims whose faces remain unidentified (10).
The perils of inadvertently silencing victims’ narratives can be found, Caswell says, in the visual celebrity of Tuol Sleng victim Hout Bophana’s mug shot, an image that has achieved near synonymy with the Cambodian genocide. The image is ubiquitous, appearing in documentary films, academic texts, and Internet articles. Although the widespread reproduction of Bophana’s photograph serves to promote awareness of the Cambodian genocide, its international popularity comes, Caswell writes, at “the expense of others” and “demand[s] these icons stand in for all the Tuol Sleng victims, despite the singularity of their stories” (12).
Taking Caswell’s stance one step further, the popularity of Bophana’s image threatens to muffle not only the voices of Tuol Sleng’s other victims, but also those of all other Cambodians who perished under Khmer Rouge rule. Here, Caswell slackens her otherwise detailed discussion and leaves the reader wondering about other instances in which the appropriation of the mug shots has inadvertently sustained the victims’ silence.
The Tuol Sleng mug shots thus present a paradox, embodying both photographic presence and narrative absence. Despite the anonymity and narrative lacunae of these images, however, the construction and implementation of archives have made extraordinary strides to encourage the Cambodian public to engage with archival records and to foster a culture of national healing and witnessing. In the chapter titled “The Making of Archives,” Caswell explains that “using records to reunite disparate information, hold mass murderers accountable, and memorialize the dead, archivists and survivors are . . . retrieving facts in ways unimaginable to those who created the original sources and subversive of their aims” (12). For Caswell, the mug shot archive is not a static body of visual information, but rather a collection of fluid texts always in a state of “becoming,” encouraging both national and individual healing and the creation of survivors’ narratives and stirring the international community to hold perpetrators legally accountable.
Caswell traces what she has aptly termed the “social life” of the Tuol Sleng mug shots by considering efforts that have been and are presently “replacing the silences of the dead with the voices of witnesses”—efforts, she insists, that are invariably “pregnant with power” (12). The 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Phnom Penh led to the harrowing discovery of Khmer Rouge atrocities at the Tuol Sleng prison, which swiftly led to finding thousands of mug shots, documents, and other incriminating material. Immediate efforts to document and preserve the mug shots were inextricably “linked with international politics from the start” (64). Using evidence of the genocide to their political advantage, the Vietnamese transformed Tuol Sleng into a “Museum of Genocidal Crime,” which opened to the public in 1979. The previous prison served not only as a monument of national mourning and memory, but also as a political pulpit from which Vietnamese occupiers strove to improve the optics of the invasion by transmitting, in the words of Judy Ledgerwood, a “‘master narrative’ [. . . that] a glorious revolution [was] stolen and perverted by a handful of sadistic, genocidal traitors who deliberately exterminated three million of their countrymen” (Ledgerwood quoted in Caswell 65). Pro-Vietnamese rhetoric failed to censure the ugly realities of Communism, condemning rather the moral turpitude of Khmer Rouge leaders in an effort to rouse support for the new PRK government. Drawing on this example, Caswell demonstrates that the Tuol Sleng mug shots were deeply enmeshed in power struggles, having been appropriated by Vietnamese leaders to craft a national narrative supporting their seizure of state power.
Yale University has also made singular contributions to the preservation of the mug shots. Founded by the Yale historian Ben Kiernan in 1994, the Cambodian Genocide Program opened a satellite office in Phnom Penh called the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam). DC-Cam’s digitization efforts were propelled initially by the US State Department’s Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, which retained Yale’s program to index Khmer Rouge materials with intentions to hold the regime legally accountable. As DC-Cam’s collection grew, Kiernan established four accessible online databases.
The first database is a biographic index of roughly thirty thousand identified Khmer Rouge war criminals and victims. The bibliographic database houses more than three-thousand Khmer Rouge records; the third database comprises a geographic map indicating the locations of mass grave sites. The fourth database, of the five thousand one hundred and ninety mug shots found at Tuol Sleng, holds identification information if available. The webpage of the Cambodian Genocide Photographic Data Base states, “The photographs are presented here in hope that these Khmer Rouge victims—most of whom remain unidentified—might be recognized by friends or family members, and thus they will no longer be forced to linger in the status of ‘unknown victim’” (85).
Digitizing the mug shots has created opportunities for Cambodians to restore the identities of previously unknown victims, mourn the dead, and participate in a national effort to counter victims’ silence. Sharply contrasting this with Vietnamese appropriation of the mug shots as propaganda fodder, Caswell incisively illustrates the various social roles imposed upon the images, underscoring the political motivations that have inspired their preservation and dissemination over the last several decades.
The shortcoming in this chapter lies in its failure to adequately address the conundrum of the global digital divide within the context of DC-Cam’s public databases, a reality felt most poignantly in a country in which almost eighty percent of the population lives outside urban areas and thus without reliable Internet access. Although Caswell does not ignore the issue (she acknowledges that in 2012, fewer than five percent of Cambodians had Internet access), she does not confront the matter with the detailed treatment it deserves. That the majority of Cambodians cannot access digital archives because of limited or nonexistent Internet access stands as a serious problem. Caswell might have strengthened her chapter by providing suggestions on what Cambodian institutions could do to surmount accessibility issues.
The “Making of Narratives” chapter discusses how the Tuol Sleng mug shots have inspired Cambodians to expose narratives about Khmer Rouge atrocities. Caswell notes that the Khmer Rouge and genocide were, “until very recently,” intensely stigmatized topics, a taboo era of Cambodian history “conspicuously absent” from academic curricula and everyday discourse (97). In light of DC-Cam’s archival efforts, however, Khmer Rouge history is now openly discussed. This chapter traces how the Tuol Sleng mug shots have inspired the articulation of narratives within media contexts, particularly formal legal testimony, documentary films, and filmed interviews among surviving perpetrators and victims.
The most compelling medium inspiring Cambodians to discuss the genocide is DC-Cam’s newsletter, Searching for the Truth. First published in January 2000, the newsletter is issued monthly in Khmer and quarterly in English. It features a series of articles on the history of the Khmer Rouge and, most important, a column titled “Family Tracing,” in which subscribers post requests for information about missing loved ones. The column typically features family photographs predating the Khmer Rouge era, accompanied by blurbs requesting more information on the whereabouts of the photographed people. The republished mug shots are introduced with these words: “The Documentation Center of Cambodia would like to thank you in advance for any additional information the reader may be able to provide relating to unidentified photos” (117–118).
Reproducing the mug shots has animated the articulation of previously silenced narratives. For example, Caswell cites the October 2001 issue, in which Tuol Sleng survivor Chum Mey published the oral narrative detailing his torture and imprisonment and his witnessing of the murder of his family by Khmer Rouge officers. Despite Mey’s fears about divulging the details of his suffering, his narrative elucidates the events of a darkly concealed past.
His story had an astonishing, unforeseen consequence. Upon reading Mey’s article and seeing his very own mug shot reprinted, Tuol Sleng survivor Bou Meng decided to emerge from anonymity to share his story with the Cambodian public. Caswell writes: “[B]y printing mug shots in various forms, DC-Cam is providing a space in which private memories become public memory, personal narrative becomes collective narrative. [. . .] DC-Cam is providing a space for individual trauma and memory to become collective trauma and memory through the construction of collective narratives about the dead” (125).
Caswell’s diligent research reveals that the newsletter’s republished photographs have led to searching families’ reunification with a dead relative’s mug shot. Confrontation with the photograph of a loved one prompts mourning and closure, and restores the identity of a formerly unnamed victim. On another level, Caswell’s discussion of the widespread distribution of Searching for the Truth in rural Cambodia reflects, in part, DC-Cam’s resourceful efforts to circumvent the global digital divide.
In the chapter “The Making of Commodities,” Caswell broaches provocative issues concerning the complex relationship among the commodification of the mug shots, international tourism, and the financial instability of Tuol Sleng survivors. The chapter posits two trenchantly argued points. First, Caswell boldly confronts the prevailing criticism of the “tourist gaze” in the context of tourism promoted by the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Second, Caswell discusses the financial plight of Tuol Sleng survivors, examining how the commodification and sale of their autobiographies and tourist photographs provides at once “renewed agency” and job-related paralysis (154).
Caswell writes: “During visits to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in December 2011 and January 2012, I was stunned to see both Bou Meng and Chum Mey—the two known surviving adult Tuol Sleng prisoners—in the courtyard of the museum selling DC-Cam publications that document their stories to foreign tourists and posing for tourist photographs” (136). Caswell understandably finds the insouciance of the site’s mundane tourist activities arresting— irreverent, even. Peddling their narratives and posing with tourists for photographs, these survivors, reflects Caswell, are “stuck in the crevices of the space-time continuum, unable to leave the place of their torture more than thirty years after their release, inexplicably forced to live as museum artifacts” (139).
She draws attention to the glaring shortcomings of the UN-Royal Government of Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal, which swiftly issued punishment to Khmer Rouge perpetrators but has left victims utterly “penniless” (144). The penury of victims is expressed poignantly by Bou Meng, who must return daily to the site of genocidal trauma to earn a scant living: “Whenever I enter this place, I get really tense, but I have to earn some money, to feed my family, because I’m inadequately supported by the state. I sell my book for $10, but some people give me $20 without getting back the change” (141). Without ample material reparations, Caswell writes, survivors must “sell their stories to tourists to survive” (140). To further underscore this injustice, she draws a blunt hypothetical situation: “Such a comparable scenario is unimaginable in the context of the Holocaust; consider the outcry if Elie Wiesel were forced to eke out his existence by selling Night to tourists day after day at Auschwitz” (144).
Conversely, Bou Meng and Chum Mey have reclaimed agency working as Cambodia’s “memory entrepreneurs” (145). Indeed, autographing books and posing for photographs with tourists at the former site of their torture is perhaps the ultimate expression of subverting Khmer Rouge ideology. With this in mind, Caswell challenges the divisive “dark tourism” debate; she claims this is a pejorative phrase for travelers who visit sites of national mourning. Academic scholarship has largely repudiated such tourists as “crass and morally bankrupt thrill seekers” motivated by “neocolonial fantasies of rescue,” citing images of tourists posing at Auschwitz and similar sites on travel blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and other social media and image-sharing webpages (146).
For readers who espouse similar opinions, Caswell argues that this stance “oversimplifies the desires of Tuol Sleng tourists”—not all who visit such places can be dismissively characterized as self-indulgent intruders (146). Rather, she asserts, “the act of posing for photographs with Tuol Sleng survivors transforms viewers into witnesses” (147). Furthermore, tourists are “primary witnesses to the ongoing financial struggles of the survivors in the face of the failure of the state and international community to provide for them” (147). Interacting with and requesting snapshots with survivors, argues Caswell, “constitutes the performance of human rights.” Caswell’s overly sanguine reading of Tuol Sleng tourist snapshots overlooks the fact that visitors, despite their financial contributions and benevolent intentions, are complicit in sustaining survivors’ dependency on an industry that has locked them into poverty. Is journeying to Cambodia and purchasing a snapshot with an impoverished survivor the only way to draw international attention to these flagrant economic injustices?
Caswell’s conclusion formulates a succinct “ethics of looking” for the archivist, librarian, and academic working to preserve historical images. She asks: “What is my ethical obligation to these victims? . . . What responsibility do I have to the Tuol Sleng victims when I introduce these images to other spectators” (162)? If the act of looking has ethical potential, she writes, “we have an ethical imperative to look at these photographs, as long as such looking is properly contextualized” (163).
Caswell exhorts archivists and academics to preserve context, to ensure that viewers are presented with details that narrate the historical circumstances that produced the records. When we look at and engage these images, we perform human rights in witnessing and remembering the political conditions that led to their production. The ethical injunction to look, to meet the gaze of the photographed “Other,” ensures that these named and nameless faces will not vanish into historical oblivion.
