Art in the Face of Radical Evil
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7341413 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thierry De Duve (Thierry De Duve is a professor at the University of Lille 3. His work has long revolved around the implications for aesthetics of Duchamp's readymade and of the work of Manet. De Duve's books in English include Pictorial Nominalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1991) and Kant After Duchamp (MIT Press, 1996)., corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 125 |
| Pages | 3-23 |
| Publication date | 2008-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | October (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-2870 • E-ISSN: 1536-013X |
| Publisher | The MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/octo.2008.125.1.3 |
| OpenAlex | W2019902718 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
OCTOBER 125, Summer 2008, pp. 3–23. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. First, the photos, without interpretation or commentary. Second, the facts. Every summer, the city of Arles, in the south of France, hosts an important photography festival entitled Les Rencontres photographiques d’Arles, with dozens of exhibitions scattered around town. In 1997, the event was placed under the artistic direction of Christian Caujolle, the co-founder and art director of the French photo agency Vu and a former chief pictures editor at Liberation. Among several other exhibitions, Caujolle curated one entitled S-21, composed of one hundred portraits or identity photographs (I don’t quite know what to call them) of victims of the Cambodian genocide. S-21 is the name of a former high school in the borough of Tuol Sleng, in Phnom Penh, which Pol Pot turned into a torture center and extermination camp. Between 1975 and 1979, 14,200 people were brutally executed at S-21, either on the premises or in a field nearby. There are seven survivors. For the sake of the regime’s police and bureaucracy, every man, woman, or child entering the center was photographed before being killed. To carry out this horrendous task, a fifteen-year-old member of the Khmer Rouge named Nhem Ein was sent to Shanghai to learn photography, and, a year later, was promoted to the rank of “photographer in chief” at S-21, with a staff of five under him. When the Vietnamese liberated the center in 1979, some 6,000 negatives were found. In 1994, two American photojournalists, Chris Riley and Douglas Niven, took it upon themselves to restore and print the negatives on behalf of the Photo Archive Group, a non-profit organization they founded. One hundred photos were enlarged and shown around the world, so that the Cambodian genocide—or self-genocide, as some preferred to call it—would not be forgotten. A book of the photos was published two years later, entitled The
Aesthetics · Art · Face (sociological concept · Linguistics · Polymer science · Cambodian History and Society · Materials Science · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.35 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2024 (16) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |