'Binh Danh: In the Eclipse of Angkor'

Live-leaf photos imprint horror of Khmer killings by Richard Nilsen
'Binh Danh: In the Eclipse of Angkor'
Lisa Sette Gallery, 4142 N. Marshall Way, Scottsdale. Through June 27.
In 1388, the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane ordered several pyramids of 40,000 human skulls each built in the conquered Persian city of Isfahan, made from the heads of those his army had decapitated. Ten years later, he had 100,000 beheaded in the sack of Delhi.

When we read about such things, the stories seem more like legends than history. The numbers can never be verified. But the murder of more than a million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s can be: They left pictures of those they killed, photographed like mug shots, often tagged with names and dates, as documentation.

Vietnamese-American artist Binh Danh has taken some of these haunting images and given them new life in his current show at Lisa Sette Gallery. He prints the negatives of the photos on living plant leaves, in a process he calls chlorophyll printing.

Full review at: http://www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/galleriesmuseums/articles/2009/06/12/20090612danhrevu0614.html