Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia's Killing Fields
The Space of Silence
Isaac Applebaum, Jack Burman, Alfredo Jaar
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography
Photographed against plain white backgrounds, the images send out tidal waves of anxiety and something akin to vertigo. I can see in the eyes of the man, woman, child, and in one case baby, often staring wildly into the camera, the knowledge of the finality awaiting them. The numbers around their necks, the unkempt clothes, the bruises or scars of torture.... As a viewer, it's impossible to know how soon death came and in what form.
Organized by the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University with the Photo Archive Group of California,Facing Death presents portraits taken from what was formerly Pol Pot's secret prison, S-21. During the five years of his brutal repression, it is estimated one seventh of Cambodia's people died from malnutrition and illness and another 200,000 were executed as enemies of the state.
Accused of betraying the Khmer Rouge, people arrived at S-21, with their loved ones, to face brutal torment and interrogation.
The 100 black and white images presented were culled from about 6,000 negatives discovered at the prison after its liberation by the Vietnamese Army in 1979. To provide proof, prisoners were photographed before their execution.
At one level, these images are obscene. At the same time, are they to be relegated to some vault because they are so terrible to look at?
"They are here as documents," says CMCP curator Pierre Dussereault. "The last thing we want to do is turn them into works of art.... First of all they were identification photographs. Then they became part of the (Tuol Sleng) Museum of Genocide (formerly S-21) as a way of remembering, as a way also of identifying relatives, acquaintances who were lost. And now they have a third life which is this traveling exhibition - which uproots them completely and takes them into a western culture."
It's "very transparent," adds Dussereault, "In spite of any kind of ideological framing you're face to face with human beings...."
Of the 14,200 inmates of S-21 only seven people are known to have survived.
"It was very spontaneous," says Dussereault, of his choice of artists for The Space of Silence, presented as an adjunct to Facing Death. "It was deliberate. They were topical and approaching the question (of genocide) from different angles, strategies and vocabulary and so on."
Jack Burman's work "Remain Silent Auschwitz-Birkenau 1994-1997" is eleven large mostly panoramic colour photographs taken of the death camps. Untitled, each is accompanied by archive images of the site in use. Sometimes he also adds cross-sectional diagrams or blueprints and in each case, several paragraphs of text. For example, viewers can read of the Nazis' meticulous calculations in constructing barracks at Birkenau. In addition to calculating the volume of space for each prisoner, per barrack the construction cost was CAN $10.27 per prisoner, and "after deducting costs of prisoner upkeep and incineration, the total average profit from all material valuables seized was CAN $1,007 per prisoner, 'not including the value of the victim's bones.'"
Burman's work utterly demolishes our present day notions of the phrase "German engineering". Here it is not about the Nazi-designed "People's Car", the Volkswagen Beetle, reincarnated. Here "German engineering" is directly intent on the production of mass death.
Often shot in rich late afternoon light, the contemporary photographs create a surreal tension. Alone, without knowing their original use, the structures look like they could be abandoned dilapidated buildings anywhere. Burman questions our own laziness in thinking evidence of evil can be seen with our eyes or contained in photographs alone.
"Images," writes Alfredo Jaar, "Have an advanced religion: they bury history." Jaar traveled to Rwanda in 1994, photographing the mass genocide of Tutsis. He returned with 3,000 photographs.
Built up in blocks or laid out in flat squares, each black linen box contains a Cibachrome print. On the lid, Jaar indicates the date, location, and context of the photograph along with a brief description in white lettering. Viewers are instructed not to touch the boxes.
Set in the large gallery, the walls painted in flat black paint, each monolith of boxes is dimly lit from above. The brilliance of Jaar's work is that it does not allow viewers to objectify, abstract or fix these events through the act of looking at photographs or objects. Instead, for each viewer Jaar's photographs will be absolutely unique and constantly evolving. He forces us to create images based on what we are able to imagine from looking inward—not from what we can see.
"I was absolutely fascinated with somebody going totally against the grain in the media today," says Dussereault. "That give and give and give and repeat and repeat and repeat... until you don't see them (the images) at all. He kind of buries the images. The installation itself is an image, this darkness that you have to walk in."
"People behave as they would in a cemetery! This is the extraordinary strength of that work.... Commemoration and images tend to fossilize memories. We want memory to be something living within people."
"There are questions of collective memories ...about words and images, about the failure of images, about their limited capacities, the notions of past and present and the sense of history."
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 2001
Organized by the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University with the Photo Archive Group of California,Facing Death presents portraits taken from what was formerly Pol Pot's secret prison, S-21. During the five years of his brutal repression, it is estimated one seventh of Cambodia's people died from malnutrition and illness and another 200,000 were executed as enemies of the state.
Accused of betraying the Khmer Rouge, people arrived at S-21, with their loved ones, to face brutal torment and interrogation.
The 100 black and white images presented were culled from about 6,000 negatives discovered at the prison after its liberation by the Vietnamese Army in 1979. To provide proof, prisoners were photographed before their execution.
At one level, these images are obscene. At the same time, are they to be relegated to some vault because they are so terrible to look at?
"They are here as documents," says CMCP curator Pierre Dussereault. "The last thing we want to do is turn them into works of art.... First of all they were identification photographs. Then they became part of the (Tuol Sleng) Museum of Genocide (formerly S-21) as a way of remembering, as a way also of identifying relatives, acquaintances who were lost. And now they have a third life which is this traveling exhibition - which uproots them completely and takes them into a western culture."
It's "very transparent," adds Dussereault, "In spite of any kind of ideological framing you're face to face with human beings...."
Of the 14,200 inmates of S-21 only seven people are known to have survived.
"It was very spontaneous," says Dussereault, of his choice of artists for The Space of Silence, presented as an adjunct to Facing Death. "It was deliberate. They were topical and approaching the question (of genocide) from different angles, strategies and vocabulary and so on."
Jack Burman's work "Remain Silent Auschwitz-Birkenau 1994-1997" is eleven large mostly panoramic colour photographs taken of the death camps. Untitled, each is accompanied by archive images of the site in use. Sometimes he also adds cross-sectional diagrams or blueprints and in each case, several paragraphs of text. For example, viewers can read of the Nazis' meticulous calculations in constructing barracks at Birkenau. In addition to calculating the volume of space for each prisoner, per barrack the construction cost was CAN $10.27 per prisoner, and "after deducting costs of prisoner upkeep and incineration, the total average profit from all material valuables seized was CAN $1,007 per prisoner, 'not including the value of the victim's bones.'"
Burman's work utterly demolishes our present day notions of the phrase "German engineering". Here it is not about the Nazi-designed "People's Car", the Volkswagen Beetle, reincarnated. Here "German engineering" is directly intent on the production of mass death.
Often shot in rich late afternoon light, the contemporary photographs create a surreal tension. Alone, without knowing their original use, the structures look like they could be abandoned dilapidated buildings anywhere. Burman questions our own laziness in thinking evidence of evil can be seen with our eyes or contained in photographs alone.
"Images," writes Alfredo Jaar, "Have an advanced religion: they bury history." Jaar traveled to Rwanda in 1994, photographing the mass genocide of Tutsis. He returned with 3,000 photographs.
Built up in blocks or laid out in flat squares, each black linen box contains a Cibachrome print. On the lid, Jaar indicates the date, location, and context of the photograph along with a brief description in white lettering. Viewers are instructed not to touch the boxes.
Set in the large gallery, the walls painted in flat black paint, each monolith of boxes is dimly lit from above. The brilliance of Jaar's work is that it does not allow viewers to objectify, abstract or fix these events through the act of looking at photographs or objects. Instead, for each viewer Jaar's photographs will be absolutely unique and constantly evolving. He forces us to create images based on what we are able to imagine from looking inward—not from what we can see.
"I was absolutely fascinated with somebody going totally against the grain in the media today," says Dussereault. "That give and give and give and repeat and repeat and repeat... until you don't see them (the images) at all. He kind of buries the images. The installation itself is an image, this darkness that you have to walk in."
"People behave as they would in a cemetery! This is the extraordinary strength of that work.... Commemoration and images tend to fossilize memories. We want memory to be something living within people."
"There are questions of collective memories ...about words and images, about the failure of images, about their limited capacities, the notions of past and present and the sense of history."
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 2001
