1st Printing. 124 pages. Published in 1996. Retrospective collection of photographs. One of the greatest photography books of the 20th century. The First Limited Edition of 3000 copies. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The Limited Edition is now rare. An austerely beautiful production by Jack Woody: Oversize-volume format. The book weighs 3 pounds. Dark brown cloth boards with black plate in the recessed center and black titles embossed on the spine, as issued. Photographs by anonymous members of the Khmer Rouge. Edited by Chris Riley and Douglas Niven. Essay by David Chandler. In publisher’s original plastic wrappers. Printed in gravure on pristine-white, thick uncoated stock paper by Nissha Printing Company in Kyoto, Japan to the highest standards. Without DJ, as issued. Presents “The Killing Fields”. The portrait gallery of genocide. The only such photography book published in our time: Boys, girls, men, women, and old people, who were photographed, many of them wearing their ID numbers (Number 1 being a very young boy), as they were checked into Tuol Sleng Prison.

 

There, their unimaginable suffering proved, if proof were needed, that while heaven is often merely a fantasy, hell is for real, a parallel universe to ordinary life on Planet Earth. Shackled, interrogated, starved, tortured, and driven mad before being executed by the Khmer Rouge, the subjects in “The Killing Fields” literally and symbolically represent their 200, 000 fellow human beings who were “processed” at various torture centers, of which Tuol Sleng, code-named S-21, was the most notorious. Pol Pot murdered as many as 1.7 million of his people, more than half the entire Cambodian population, during his Reign of Terror between 1975 and 1979, in order to realize the creation of the ideal agrarian society. He ordered the killings in a systematic fashion, the logic behind them beyond sadistic, vengeful, or paranoid (although it was all of these as well). It was utopia become barbarism, a utopia that was thought out by Saloth Sar, the real name of Pol Pot, for his graduate-degree thesis at the University of Paris. Saloth Sar concluded that everyone, even a committed Marxist, could become a “microbe”, which had no place in society if there was the slightest doubt about its “purity”.

 

Anyone who was “impure” (as all human beings are) needed to be “disinfected”, that is, killed. “It is better to kill you by mistake than to keep you alive by mistake” (Pol Pot). An absolute “must-have” title for photography book collectors. This is a copy of the First Limited Edition of 3000 copies. This title is a great book. This is one of few copies of the Limited Edition still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare copy thus. 100 gravure plates. “The Killing Fields” was selected as the Best Photography Book of the Year by the International Center for Photography (ICP) in 1996.