The genocide in Cambodia under the leadership of Pol Pot killed an estimated 3 million people, with thousands being tortured in an infamous prison known as Tuol Sleng. The people who walked through those doors knew they were walking into a hell on earth—but don’t tell artist Matt Loughrey, who decided to add some artistic flair to the haunting images for Vice. Instead of reflecting their terror, he made some of them smile.

It’s a travesty and shows the lack of respect for history and the victims of the Killing Fields.

Helping people connect to the past is challenging. As someone passionate about history, I’m always surprised how many people don’t know simple things about an important event like the Civil War, something even I don’t know much as a European history specialist. Many tell me that while they’re interested now, they just didn’t really care in high school

Most of the time, history is seen as boring since it is superficially filled with faceless people, so it’s somewhat understandable. For thousands of years, only a select few were able to immortalize themselves by commissioning an artist who could capture their image for the ages.

But photographs can leave an indelible impact on someone looking to connect with the people who’ve gone before us.

One picture that comes to mind is the unforgettable image of a Jewish man standing above a mass grave right before he’s shot, his eyes looking off to the side at either his shooter, who has a gun aimed at his temple, or one of the 20 or so other Nazis surrounding him. What was he thinking as he stood in front a pit filled with the bodies of his loved ones? It looks like he even has a jacket in his hand, as if he was on his way to his job before the Einsatzgruppe D, Nazi mobile death squads, grabbed him and likely made him and others dig this mass grave.

The photo is known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa,” supposedly since that’s what was written on the back by one of his murders.

Now imagine if that photograph was colorized and edited to remove the gun and instead put a Nurf or paintball gun there instead and put a smile on everyone’s face, as if the men are just part of some sort of party. That’s not “history” or “art,” but a willful disregard for the past.

There’s nothing wrong with colorizing a historic image to add an extra level of depth, which Peter Jackson did in the excelled film/documentary They Shall Not Grow Old with old World War I film reels. But to essentially rewrite history by inserting something lighthearted into an incredibly macabre situation where people died, that’s entirely different and shows a profound level of disrespect for experience of people who were brutalized and killed and their families.

The project started out simple enough. Loughrey, who has a business colorizing old photos, had received requests from family members of victims of the Cambodian genocide to colorize the images. The pictures reflected the men and women arriving at Tuol Sleng, a converted school that became a place of immeasurable suffering and death where only 12 people out of 20,000 survived. 

As Loughrey started his work, he decided to take some artistic license, and instead of just adding color to the intake pictures made the decision to change the solum expression of some of the prisoners and add a smile. Vice decided to publish the project but was quickly met with outrage as casual viewers and family members of the victims immediately called foul.

To add insult to injury, Loughrey failed to even properly tell the stories of some of those who died or identify them by the correct name.

Family member Lydia, under the Twitter handle @theycallmelyd, shared that the essentially everything Loughrey wrote about a man called “Bora” in the article was false.

Lydia explains, it “states that he was a farmer, had a (presumably) living son, was electrocuted and set on fire…We don’t know the exact way in which he died, and there may be a record of that we haven’t seen. But the rest is false: he was not a farmer, bur a primary school teacher. It’s impossible for Loughrey to have been in contact with his son, because his only children also died.”

So not only did Loughrey put smiles on the faces of suicide victims, but he also couldn’t even identify the victim properly and mixed his story up with another.

Needless to say, Vice pulled the article and issued an apology, but it remains a shocking and disturbing editorial oversight. 

However, it seems like part of a growing trend. Last summer, mobs of people pulled down statues of historical figures and in some instances local and state governments made the decision to remove statues that the liberal mob could identify as “problematic,” like the statue of President Theodore Roosevelt outside the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Loughrey seems as if he’s in the same group. Perusing through his work under the Instagram account @my_colorful_past, he not only colorizes photos but animates them as well. While it could be considered interesting, I find it rather unsettling. Is it really necessary to mess with historical images to that extent? 

In this age of limitless technology, it gives us the ability to see deeper into the past, but it’s also far too easy for some to use that power to try and rewrite it as well.  

That’s why any project like Loughrey’s should be tempered not by pushing the limits, but by honoring those that came before.

Image from Flicker – Christian Haugen.