Altered Photos Hide Disputed Khmer Artifacts
Architectural Digest magazine is coming under scrutiny for altering pictures to edit out Khmer artifacts that were allegedly looted from Cambodia in a photo spread of a lavish San Francisco home belonging to executive Roger Barnett and lawyer and author Sloan Lindemann Barnett. Sloan is the daughter of the late billionaire George Lindemann and Frayda Lindemann, avid Asian artifact collectors who had a large number of Khmer artifacts that the Cambodian government says were looted, including two of the country’s ten most important stolen items.
Experts consulted by the Washington Post confirm the alteration of the photos, although an Architectural Digest spokesperson said that the magazine did not “show the relics because of ‘unresolved publication rights around select artworks.’” The magazine offered no further explanation.
The Post also reports that “agents from the antiquities unit at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have contacted the Lindemann family in recent years about its Khmer collection and there is no indication that the family plans to return the statues.”
The Khmer items along with many others have been traced to Douglas Latchford, a British antiquities collector who acquired looted temple artwork in Cambodia and sold it to wealthy collectors. Latchford also took advantage of opaque laws on the Island of Jersey, creating shell organizations to avoid scrutiny by international authorities.
The Washington Post article is a thorough discussion of how these particular Khmer items were taken, traced, and identified and presents a larger picture of the difficulties investigators come up against in finding and retrieving such objects. Lack of paperwork, transactions run through shell companies, and lack of will to enforce the law and recover items are complicated by prohibitively expensive legal proceedings.
Cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum in New York and universities like Oxford and Cambridge in the UK have come under pressure to return looted art and cultural items and many have done so. Their concern with public opinion and private donations may influence their actions. However, artifacts in the hands of private collectors are more difficult to get to. They’re rarely on public display and there is very little incentive for anyone to voluntarily part with something of such monetary value.
But the alteration of the photos in Architectural Digest may be an indication that even private collectors are aware of and sensitive to the stigma of owning items with disputed or problematic origins.
