Caesar: 53,000 Photographs of the Dead

Caesar was a photographer employed by the Syrian military police. His job — which he had held since before the uprising — was to photograph the bodies of people who died in government detention, for bureaucratic record-keeping. When the mass detentions began in 2011, the volume of bodies he photographed surged from dozens to thousands. Each corpse arrived from detention facilities labeled with an ID number. The bodies showed systematic evidence of torture: emaciation, burns, gouged eyes, ligature marks. Caesar began secretly copying the photographs onto USB drives and smuggling them out of the country, using a network of contacts. He continued this for approximately two years, at extraordinary personal risk — discovery would have meant immediate execution. In 2013 he successfully fled Syria with 53,275 photographs. A team of former war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts authenticated the images and presented them to the UN Security Council in January 2014. Their report stated the evidence showed 'industrial scale killing.'