Allan deSouza
[Artist and writer, b. 1958, Nairobi, Kenya, lives in Los Angeles.]

 Photography is now so vital to memory, as a safeguard that the past will not be erased. With the Jewish Holocaust, for example, photographs have become so central to the process of remembering—not necessarily private, but certainly collective, and ironically, we often rely, as with the Khmer Rouge, on the photographs taken by the murderers.