Thread by @harikunzru

The idea of photoshopping smiles onto Tuol Sleng prisoners is completely deranged.

https://twitter.com/vinkjohn/status/1380876964467249156

I think @VICE should take this down. There’s no value to it. It disrespects the dead and, as others have said, falsifies history.

I read the piece (won’t link) and his motives seem muddled. I doubt he’d feel ok altering Shoah photos (maybe he would?) which opens up the question of why the S21 pictures appear available to him to make this intervention.

This:

https://twitter.com/sreypichch/status/1380965038039654407

Photographer says these images were made at the request of families. In that case extremely weird of @VICE to run them without that context

https://twitter.com/quinnlibson/status/1380954677462794240

It’s one thing to make these for families, if that’s their purpose. Circulating them in this way makes them into something different and still doesn’t seem appropriate.

These pictures are already causing confusion among people who don’t understand the circumstances in which they were taken

These are pictures I took when I went there. The apparatus on the left, I was told, was used by the photographer to hold people still for the portraits. On the right, how the images are displayed at the museum.

The photographer, Nhem En, was interviewed by the NYT in 2007, when he was a witness in one of the genocide trials nytimes.com/2007/10/26/wor…

I broke down completely after I went there. I sat on a bench outside and wept.

It's a small place, a school building. The subjects of these pictures could hear torture taking place nearby. At least 12,000 people were killed here. Only 15 are known to have survived.

This seems definitive. Read down the thread. The story the photographer gave is false and someone shows that even this picture was altered

https://twitter.com/theycallmelyd/status/1381005057936785413

The @VICE article has been taken down after an official complaint from the Cambodian government. Loughrey had just pulled the photos from a website without seeking permission. This story includes commentary from Cambodian experts. cambodianess.com/article/a-stor…

Since this has dragged me back into thinking about S21, I’ve been looking at the archive online. This shows the contraption I photographed (pic in thread above). Single shot, no alternate ‘smiling’ frames. Many taken and developed onsite every day.

I broke the thread. Suturing:

https://twitter.com/harikunzru/status/1381048254268334082