Critical Human Rights. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. xii, 231 pp. (Figures.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-299-29754-1.
Michelle Caswell’s Archiving the Unspeakable traces the social life of a profoundly haunting set of photographs. Upon entering Tuol Sleng, the infamous Khmer Rouge torture, interrogation, and killing center (also known as S21), prisoners were systematically photographed. Whereas almost none of the estimated 16,000 prisoners lived to tell their story, over 5,000 mug shots and other photographs from the prison have survived. The mug shots have since taken on iconic status, giving individual faces to the almost unfathomable scale of suffering and loss of life perpetrated by that brutal regime.
Caswell takes her readers on a meticulously researched and compellingly narrated journey through the making, archiving, and contemporary circulation of these photographs. In the introduction to the book she provides theoretical framing, bringing theories generated within the field of archival studies into dialogue with anthropological scholarship on material objects, archives and the production of history. The first chapter examines the making of the photographs and their prehistory in colonial-era police photography. The bureaucratic process of taking photographs served two functions, Caswell argues, performatively transforming men, women, and children into “enemies” of the regime and enabling those working at the prison to act as mere cogs in a relentless machine of death. The book’s second chapter details the process of gathering the images into archives. It recounts the often heroic efforts of profoundly committed individuals to preserve the images and make them accessible in the face of local hostility, international indifference, technical and financial limitations, and the ravages of tropical climate and neglect. The third chapter traces how the archived images have been used as prompts for stories, becoming “active agents in the performance of human rights” (98) in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and in documentary films, NGO publications, and photographs showing survivors, descendants and tourists looking at or holding the photographs. Narrative-making and the visual act of bearing witness are intimately entwined here, and the images serve as both documentary evidence and affectively charged proxies for the dead that demand to be given a voice by the living. The fourth chapter addresses the commodification of the images within Cambodia’s emerging tourism industry. Against negative assessments of “atrocity tourism,” Caswell argues that visiting sites like the Tuol Sleng museum can transform tourists into engaged witnesses; the act of photographing themselves with mug shots and survivors—and circulating these images via social media—facilitates this transformation. In the conclusion, Caswell revisits debates about the ethics of looking at atrocity photographs, concluding that the Tuol Sleng images play a vital role in acts of bearing witness and remembering the dead.
Tracing the photographs’ historical trajectories, Caswell approaches them as agentive participants in political processes. She is sensitive to the play of absence and presence that animates them, and she attends carefully to the ways that they take on different potentialities and potencies as they shift formats and contexts. Throughout, Caswell draws on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s analysis of the “silencing of the past” as it occurs at distinct moments in the production of history, reminding us of the multiple ways in which the images at once testify to and participate in the silencing of victims of the Khmer Rouge. The chapters are replete with fascinating, often poignant moments in the social life of the photographs.
Yet the book’s greatest strength—Caswell’s tenacious focus on the images—will also be a weakness for some readers. At times one wishes for a broader view of the historical and political processes at work in Cambodian society as it grapples with its past. And the question of how the making of the images or their current mobilizations might be inflected by Cambodian or regional approaches to photography, death, and memory also goes largely unexplored. Clearly, a purely culturalist reading of the mug shots would have been profoundly misguided, and Caswell is right to situate the images within technologies of modern bureaucracy and surveillance and contemporary human rights campaigns. But what would have emerged from a more ethnographic reading of the Tuol Sleng images along the lines of Alan Klima’s analysis of images of political violence in Thailand (The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)? What if the instances of mug shots apparently imbued with the spirits of the dead (briefly noted in several places in the text) had received more sustained attention? (I think here of Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013] about the role of ghosts in contemporary Vietnamese memories of the American war.)
Finally, the book’s engagement with the photographs as “records” leaves their visual status less deeply engaged than one might expect. Despite reference to W.J.T. Mitchell’s provocative question in his book What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), we learn more about what has happened to the images than about why and how they make such powerful claims on viewers. Atrocity photographs typically show acts of violence enacted on human bodies, or the traces of such acts after they have occurred. How does the peculiar anticipatory temporality of these photographs—images of people “who are dead and who are going to die,” to paraphrase Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)—act upon the viewer? What is the effect of being looked at by the people in these photographs? Why have some mug shots—particularly those showing attractive young women and children with resigned, even serene, expressions—circulated more widely than others?
If such questions suggest that more remains to be said about the Tuol Sleng photographs, the book is nevertheless a welcome contribution to scholarship on photography, human rights, and the making of historical memory in Cambodia and beyond. In Caswell’s account, the archive, its material contents, and history itself are revealed to be open-ended processes rather than fixed contents. Like the struggle to hold perpetrators accountable, remember the victims, and rebuild a devastated country, the photographs of Tuol Sleng remain unfinished.
Karen Strassler
Queens College, City University of New York, Flushing, USA
pp. 960-962