As we walked the Killing Fields where Khmer Rouge execution squads murdered thousands of Cambodian citizens more than 30 years ago, we stepped over piles of rotting garments that had come to the surface from the mass graves that covered this area. I made this image from a fairly close distance. The clothing appears to be a pile of rags, surrounded by both live and dead leaves. Yet once we acquire verbal context for this image, discovering that we are looking a casual pile of clothing that once belonged to innocent people who were murdered here in cold blood, the image becomes terrifying. In a way, it was far more sobering to stumble across this scene than it was to visit the mass tomb that displays hundreds of skulls just across the field. The skulls of the dead have at least acquired a sense of consecration, yet these clothes remain abandoned and defiled, and because of that, they are all the more painful to look at.