In the Khmer Rouge’s brief but devastating rule, approximately two million Cambodians died. The regime kept meticulous records, including registration photographs of the 20,000 prisoners tortured at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. This presentation traces the social life of these mug shots, from their historical roots in French colonial police photography and their discursive power to transform suspects into enemies of the state, to international and local efforts to preserve, display and digitize them, and their ongoing use by survivors and victims’ families to spark narratives about the dead in legal testimonies, memoirs, and documentary films. Additionally, these mug shots have been incorporated into new photographs that document the act of looking at them, adding a layer of meaning and context to the ever-expanding archives of the Cambodian genocide and revealing the strategic deployment of records for human rights activism against a political climate that encourages forgetting.