It is a simple caption: “Comrade Duch confesses to mass murder.”
For Nic Dunlop, who took the photograph in Cambodia in 1999, it was the culmination of years of obsession.
The man pictured, Kaing Guek Eav — more commonly known as Comrade Duch — was a senior official of the Khmer Rouge regime, during which 1.7 million people were killed outright or died as a result of torture, disease, overwork and starvation. Duch was responsible for the deaths of at least 14,000 people at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. In the more than 30 years since the killings, he is the first senior member of the Khmer Rouge to be tried, facing a life sentence on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, in addition to homicide and torture.
A verdict in the case, before a United Nations-backed tribunal, is expected Monday.
All of it is the result of a chance encounter that allowed Mr. Dunlop to capture the confession on film.
Mr. Dunlop chronicled his story, and Duch’s, in the 2005 book, “The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields,” which was translated into Cambodian and sold there in manuscript format. Mr. Dunlop, 40, lives in Bangkok and is represented by Panos Pictures.
Mr. Dunlop was born in Ireland. He was only 10 years old when the Khmer Rouge were driven from power. But as a teenager, he said, he was drawn to the tragedy of Cambodia. He was looking for context, and an answer to the question: Where do people like Comrade Duch come from?
Toward the end of the 1990s, Mr. Dunlop visited Cambodia a number of times. He began to carry a photograph of Duch in his pocket. While traveling with a mine-clearance team on a photo assignment in western Cambodia, he happened to encounter a small man who looked very familiar. Though he introduced himself as Hang Pin, Mr. Dunlop had few doubts about who it was.
Their first conversation, he said, was banal. Mr. Dunlop asked where he was from and what he had done for a living. “Of course, I didn’t ask him his real name then and there,” Mr. Dunlop said.
A few weeks later, Mr. Dunlop returned to the village of Samlaut with Nate Thayer, the last Western journalist to have interviewed Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge. They arranged an interview with Duch, during which it appeared to dawn on Duch that they knew exactly who he was. That elicited what Mr. Dunlop calls “an extraordinary confession” in which Duch named names, traced the chain of command and expressed what seemed to be genuine remorse.
After the story of their meeting appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Duch surrendered to authorities. But Mr. Dunlop’s reporting was not over. He sought to expand on Duch’s story. “It isn’t a cardboard cutout figure — a monster — at the end, but actually a wizened old man who appears to be contrite.”
Photography is a key theme in “The Lost Executioner.” Every person who was killed at the Tuol Sleng prison (code named S-21) had been photographed. “Photography was an integral part of identifying enemies and reducing them in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge,” Mr. Dunlop says in the book. Once prisoners were captured in the frame, they could never be anything but guilty in the eyes of their captor. It was “a kind of trial by camera.”
The images are displayed on the walls of the prison, which is now the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide.
For Nic Dunlop, who took the photograph in Cambodia in 1999, it was the culmination of years of obsession.
The man pictured, Kaing Guek Eav — more commonly known as Comrade Duch — was a senior official of the Khmer Rouge regime, during which 1.7 million people were killed outright or died as a result of torture, disease, overwork and starvation. Duch was responsible for the deaths of at least 14,000 people at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. In the more than 30 years since the killings, he is the first senior member of the Khmer Rouge to be tried, facing a life sentence on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, in addition to homicide and torture.
A verdict in the case, before a United Nations-backed tribunal, is expected Monday.
All of it is the result of a chance encounter that allowed Mr. Dunlop to capture the confession on film.
Mr. Dunlop chronicled his story, and Duch’s, in the 2005 book, “The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields,” which was translated into Cambodian and sold there in manuscript format. Mr. Dunlop, 40, lives in Bangkok and is represented by Panos Pictures.
Mr. Dunlop was born in Ireland. He was only 10 years old when the Khmer Rouge were driven from power. But as a teenager, he said, he was drawn to the tragedy of Cambodia. He was looking for context, and an answer to the question: Where do people like Comrade Duch come from?
Toward the end of the 1990s, Mr. Dunlop visited Cambodia a number of times. He began to carry a photograph of Duch in his pocket. While traveling with a mine-clearance team on a photo assignment in western Cambodia, he happened to encounter a small man who looked very familiar. Though he introduced himself as Hang Pin, Mr. Dunlop had few doubts about who it was.
Their first conversation, he said, was banal. Mr. Dunlop asked where he was from and what he had done for a living. “Of course, I didn’t ask him his real name then and there,” Mr. Dunlop said.
A few weeks later, Mr. Dunlop returned to the village of Samlaut with Nate Thayer, the last Western journalist to have interviewed Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge. They arranged an interview with Duch, during which it appeared to dawn on Duch that they knew exactly who he was. That elicited what Mr. Dunlop calls “an extraordinary confession” in which Duch named names, traced the chain of command and expressed what seemed to be genuine remorse.
After the story of their meeting appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Duch surrendered to authorities. But Mr. Dunlop’s reporting was not over. He sought to expand on Duch’s story. “It isn’t a cardboard cutout figure — a monster — at the end, but actually a wizened old man who appears to be contrite.”
Photography is a key theme in “The Lost Executioner.” Every person who was killed at the Tuol Sleng prison (code named S-21) had been photographed. “Photography was an integral part of identifying enemies and reducing them in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge,” Mr. Dunlop says in the book. Once prisoners were captured in the frame, they could never be anything but guilty in the eyes of their captor. It was “a kind of trial by camera.”
The images are displayed on the walls of the prison, which is now the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide.
“It’s so profoundly upsetting to stand in an empty room surrounded by thousands of pairs of eyes,” Mr. Dunlop said. “You know that all of those people who are looking at you are dead and may have died in that very room.”
In the book, Mr. Dunlop also reflects on how easy it is to lose sight of the humanity of the people one is photographing. He describes the process of editing pictures he had taken of a mortally wounded Cambodian soldier. “I realized that I had viewed him at the time as a series of aesthetic and technical calculations and judgments: the correct exposure that I wanted, the angle, the depth of field,” Mr. Dunlop writes. “Like the prisoners of S-21, people had become mere objects in my viewfinder.”
Therein, Mr. Dunlop said, was an important — and visceral — lesson.
“We should be careful about shutting off a greater understanding, which is vital,” he said. “I think it’s morally irresponsible and intellectually lazy if we simply brand people like this as monsters.”
Vann Nath holds his mug shot, taken when he was a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. He was one of only seven people who survived incarceration in Tuol Sleng.
