The notorious Cambodian security prison that processed and eventually sent nearly 20,000 people to their deaths in the 1970s is now the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. A mug shot was made of every prisoner, and many of them are now on display in that museum. Among them is this photograph of an unidentified woman. It was the only one on display that has disintegrated due to faulty or hasty darkroom processing. Yet it remains on display, and I photographed it as a symbol of obliteration, the ultimate purpose of the prison, once a high school. Only three people who were imprisoned there survived. This woman did not. She, as most of the inmates at that prison, was executed in the Killing Fields, just outside the city. All of the photographs on display in the museum are of anonymous prisoners but this damaged photograph, which appears as if the subject’s brain is exploding, makes its subject even more anonymous. She becomes an unforgettably horrific symbol of the brutality inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979.