By Maureen Lambray
Essays by David P. Chandler and Margo Picken

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“These compelling and very moving photographs by Maureen Lambray are here to remind us of the never-ending suffering of the Cambodian people. The war in Cambodia, for many of the poor, is still not over. Lambray’s powerful photos show how great their sacrifice is.” -Don McCullin

“Maureen Lambray’s photographs are poignant, serious, affecting, passionate without being mawkish, and beautifully composed.” -Martin Barnes, Curator of Photographs, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

“The quiet mood of [Maureen Lambray's] carefully composed and lit portraits of land-mine victims, as they stare intently at the camera, belies the horror of their mutilation.” ~Seth Mydans, New York Times Lens Blog

Along with haunting landscapes, the stark, powerful portraits in this book portray those who suffered greatly under the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and who, in a sense, are the human embodiment of the country’s deepest and unhealed wounds.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge armies defeated the Lon Nol regime and took Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, dispersing its more than two million inhabitants to a life of hard agricultural labor in the countryside. During the next four years, the Khmer Rouge – headed by Pol Pot – terrorized the population.

The numbers are staggering. Almost 1.7 million Cambodians were killed (including half of the 425,00 Chinese Cambodian population), and millions of others were forcibly relocated, deprived of food, tortured, or sent into forced labor. The horror lasted until 1998 when Pol Pot died and Khmer insurgency collapsed; in 2002 the first local elections were held, marking an end to the nightmare. Yet, the legacy of those decades still haunts Cambodia, where many of the country’s present troubles are rooted in its past. The nation is plagued by corruption, frail governance, a weak judiciary, land-grabbing, trafficking, domestic violence, torture by police and in prisons, and a censored press, while its people suffer terrible poverty, limited health care, minimal infrastructure, and poor education.

MAUREEN LAMBRAY spent six years working on the Khmer Rouge project. Her work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Esquire, TIME, and Newsweek. In 1979, she was invited by Yassir Arafat to Beirut where she compiled one of the first in-depth looks by an outsider into the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Following this, Lambray shot an electrifying photo essay on prison and refugee camps along the Cambodia-Thailand border during the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. In 1980 she covered for TIME magazine the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; disguised as an Afghan man, she was the first woman smuggled into the country by Mujahadeen. In southern Mexico, the Zapatista uprising in 1994 became part of a project she had undertaken to document obscure Indian tribes. Her photographs are in the collections of museums worldwide and numerous private collections.

DAVID P. CHANDLER is an American historian regarded as one of the foremost western scholars of Cambodia’s modern history. He is Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University, Australia. His books about Cambodia include A History of Cambodia, Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison, and Brother Number One.

MARGO PICKEN worked for the United Nations as director of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia from 2001 to 2007. She is now an associate of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a senior visiting fellow at Global Governance LSE.

Hardcover / $60
9.6″ x 12″
136 pages / 60 tri-tone photographs
ISBN: 978-1-884167-31-7
October 2011

All images copyright of Maureen Lambray

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