ABSTRACT
Perpetrator photographs are taken by those who commit crimes and atrocities to record and extol their own power and to humiliate their victims. They are the most unnerving genre of photography possible, and this is not only because what they show is often disgustingly brutal. Equally dismaying is what these images say about those who took them. Perpetrator photographs are not always bloody, nor do they always show overt acts of violence – though fear and pain are always their subject. Although quite different from the Nazi images, the photographs taken in Stalin's notorious Lubyunka prison, mainly in the 1930s, are another version of this genre. The category of perpetrator photographs is too capacious. Saddam Hussein's Baathists, Somalia's Hizbul Islam, Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front are all known to have recorded some of their atrocities.
