Bt Sopheng Cheang, The Associated Press
Published Monday, April 12, 2021 at 7:22am
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodians continued to condemn an Irish photo restorer on Monday who altered pictures of victims of the country’s 1970s genocide to make them smile, saying the restorer’s decision, and that of an international media group to publish it, showed terrible judgment.
On Friday, Vice published an interview with Matt Lafley, who colorized photos of prisoners from the Khmer Rouge’s notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, where an estimated 17,000 suspected enemies of the communist regime were incarcerated and tortured before being executed.
Vice has since removed the article from its website and released a statement saying it is investigating the matter.
“When you imagine the smiles on the faces of the Khmer Rouge’s victims, the judgments of that time must have been terrible,” Yuk Chan, director of the Cambodian Documentation Center, said Monday.
Youk Chanh’s centre is packed with evidence of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge, who are blamed for killing an estimated 1.7 million of their own people through executions, starvation, overwork and lack of medical care. After winning the civil war and seizing power in 1975, the Khmer Rouge’s paranoid leaders blamed their enemies for the failure of their utopian plans and purges continued until the Vietnamese invasion ousted them in 1979.
The controversy over the photo raises questions about what limits should be placed on the manipulation of historical imagery – a particularly sensitive issue in the case of Cambodia, where the trauma of atrocities is still evident.
“The lesson we can learn from this is that we must accept the fact that the Khmer Rouge is not a thing of the past,” Youk Chan told The Associated Press in an email. “How can we say it is a thing of the past when at least five million Khmer Rouge survivors are still alive today?”
In an interview with Vice, Lafley said he was asked by families of S-21 victims to colorize photos of their loved ones, and then he independently colorized further photos from the prison that is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The Associated Press was unable to reach Lafley for comment on Monday.
The article includes several color photographs showing prisoners at S-21 smiling for the camera, and Lafley offered his own theory to Vice’s interviewer about why they might be smiling.
“Women were more likely to smile than men,” he told Vice, “and I think that has a lot to do with nervousness.”
The article raised alarm bells among people familiar with the original black-and-white collection, including John Vink, a professional photographer who worked in Cambodia, who pointed out that in at least some of the original photos, the subjects were not smiling, and that Lafley had not only colorized the images but had also retouched them to change their facial expressions.
“Vice’s Matt Laffrey isn’t just colorizing S21 photos, he’s falsifying history,” a smiling Vink tweeted on Saturday, showing examples of the original photo and Laffrey’s altered version.
Cambodian social media users also joined the fray.
“Matt Loughrey and ↕viceasia↕vice’s actions have truly hurt me, my mother and an entire Cambodian society that continues to suffer deeply from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge,” Thida Raper tweeted.
An online petition was started calling for Vice to remove the article with the photo and issue an apology to Lafley.
Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts issued a statement on Sunday saying: “Such manipulation is unacceptable. We believe that Mat Rowney’s work deeply impacts the dignity of the victims and the reality of Cambodian history and violates the museum’s rights as the lawful owner and custodian of these photographs.”
The paper said the use of S-21’s photos was restricted by Cambodian law and warned that it would consider legal action unless Lafley & Vice took the photos offline.
“We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical materials out of respect for the victims,” the ministry said.
By Monday, Vice had removed the article and posted a statement in its place.
“The article contained photographs of Khmer Rouge victims which Mr. Lafley did more than colourise,” the paper acknowledged. “The article was removed because it did not meet VICE’s editorial standards. We regret our error and will investigate why this failure in the editorial process occurred.”