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their death warrant. Only seven people survived their
admission to Tuol Sleng.
During its exhibition, MOMA provided no captions
with the photographs, no names, no details of
who each individual was, no mention of how or why
they’d died. For MOMA’s purposes, these photos
had stopped being individual records of genocide but
had become mere portraiture. They were nice photos,
nothing more. There were no indications that each of
these people had died at the hands of torturers. There
were no calls for justice.
Dunlop writes movingly of his own frustration
BUY Nic Dunlop books online from and
with the limits of photography – that without words,
images are lost without context, turned into disinterested
aesthetic objects, mere decoration. The Lost
Executioner is clearly the product of Dunlop’s frustration
with his own profession, and photography’s
loss is writing’s gain. In telling his story of going in
search of Comrade Duch, Dunlop also tells the story
of Cambodia going in search of answers to its own
auto-genocide and the still-ongoing quest for some
sort of justice. For all the grimness of its subject
matter, The Lost Executioner is a vital book and one
that deserves to reach a huge audience. �
209
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