Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/04/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>Definitely worth seeking out, and if you don't have >access to the print >edition, the story and some of the pictures can be >found at >http://w>ww.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/041900vietn>am-photos.html(registration required, if you've never >visited the NY Times We>b site >before). >As B.D. noted, this project is being run by the same >people who >retrieved >the negatives from the Khmer Rouge "interrogation >center" (the Khmer >Rouge >were as anal-retentive as the Nazis when it came to >documenting who >they >killed, but they had to high-tail it out of town >before they could >destroy >their records) and published the victims' portraits in >book "The >Killing >Fields." I visited the Khmer Rouge center, Tuol Sleng prison, in Phnom Penh some five years ago. There are several rooms, in this innocuous former school building, that are full of passport-size pictures of the Pol Pot victims that died there. The prison is now a museum, and our visit left us sleepless for many nights. The pictures, the torture rooms, the now clean classrooms with tiny brick cubicles where the prisoners were held and the agony of the museum-attendants living there now and having to tell about it every day was something we will not forget. I took many pictures - was even invited to do so - but have had no heart yet to publish them in a slidesequence, as was the plan. May be when the Trinunal starts, that will be a good moment. "La Condition Humaine" becomes painfully clear when, in the same country one visits the savage beauty of the temples of Angkor. We had a very nice local guide, a young man some 25 years old, and his account of how he experienced his counntry and how the people coped with the terrible inheritance of the Pol Pot regime made us very sad. And that in the midst of what arguably is the most wonderful and biggest religiously inspired ( people also lived there) ensemble in the world. Sander van Hulsenbeek Amsterdam Holland __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send online invitations with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com