S-21 / Tuol Sleng

 

In 1979, a couple of days after the Vietnamese army entered Phnom Penh, two photojournalists who had accompanied the invasion were drawn toward a particular compound by the smell of decomposing bodies. The site was surrounded by a corrugated tin fence topped with coils of barbed wire and looked like an abandoned school building. Over the gate was a red placard inscribed in yellow with a Khmer slogan: “Fortify the spirit of the revolution! Be on your guard against the strategy and tactics of the enemy so as to defend the country, the people and the Party.” The place carried no other identification. In rooms on the ground floor of the southernmost building, the two Vietnamese came across the corpses of several recently murdered men. Some of the bodies were chained to iron beds. The prisoners’ throats had been cut. The blood on the floors was still wet. Altogether the bodies of fourteen people were discovered in the compound, apparently killed only a couple of days before. In the days that followed, the Vietnamese army found more then 50 bodies, all kinds of torture devices and an immense archive. This is how the secret prison of Khmer Rouge, called S-21 in which more then 15 thousand people were killed, saw the light of day. Only three months after its discovery, the Vietnamese government turned it into the Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Tuol Sleng (name of the hill on which it stands, meaning sleng tree, which is known to bear poisonous fruits) and opened it to the public. The compound besides being cleaned, was left intact. 

 

 

Tuol Sleng victim headshots

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Mr. Nhem En’s career in the Khmer Rouge began in 1970 at age 9 when he was recruited as a village boy to be a drummer in a touring revolutionary band. When he was 16, he said, he was sent to China for a seven-month course in photography. After this he became the chief of six photographers at Pol Pot’s secret prison S-21. He is the author of most of the pictures, that now hang in rows at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Phnom Penh. The eyes of the victims in the pictures, so painfully directed at us are in fact pointed towards Mr. Nhem En, who in a New York Times interview, said: 

They came in blindfolded, and I had to untie the cloth. I was alone in the room, so I am the one they saw. They would say: Why was I brought here? What am I accused of? What did I do wrong? ‘Look straight ahead. Don’t lean your head to the left or the right.’ That’s all I said. I had to say that so the picture would turn out well. Then they were taken to the interrogation center. The duty of the photographer was just to take the picture.’ (Seth Mydans, “Out From Behind a Camera at a Khmer Torture House”)

THE EXHIBITION (MoMA)

From May 15 to September 30, 1997, a selection of 22 headshot pictures from Tuol Sleng was displayed as “Photographs from S21: 1975-1979″, at MoMA, New York. The exhibition was organized by two American photographers, Chris Riley and Doug Niven, who discovered 6,000 original 6 x 6 cm negatives in a cabinet in Tuol Sleng and copyrighted possession of 100 of them. By exposing the pictures on the walls of an influential art museum, the pictures became disconnected from their history and what more important from their ability to animate the tragedy of those they depict. They turned into anonymous artifacts, aesthetically satisfying and emotionally powerful but lacking there function as traces of both their referents (victims) and the Cambodian Genocide. Only 22 pictures were exhibited, who did the selection? And what where the criteria? Todd Gitlin has compared the prospect of selecting which images to print and display to having to decide who was going to live or die – yet it is unclear if Gitlin means that those displayed have been saved. Instead, our looking at them may condemn them to a new death every time, since they are allowed to stand for nothing else. The photographs were largely presented as fine art, Riley and Niven also made several sets of art-quality prints for sale to collectors. One reviewer praised the photographer (who somehow unknown to MoMA at the time, was Nhem En) and compared him to Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, writing that, “these starkly powerful photographs are as complex and human as any series of portraits.” A grand statement if not for the fact that they do not symbolize human tragedy but are proof of it. We must not forget that as much as they are images even beautiful ones, they foremost torture devices and testimonials of pain and atrocities.

 

References:

S. Mydans, “Out From Behind a Camera at a Khmer Torture House”, online at:

 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E1DA1231F934A15753C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

D. Hawk, The Photographic Record, in: K. Jackson (ed.), Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death, Princeton Univeristy Press, 1989.

T. Roma, Looking Into the Face of Our Own Worst Fears Through Photography in: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 44.10 (1997)

 

 

The Cambodian Genocide

 

In April 1975 the radical Communist party called the Khmer Rouge entered the capital of Cambodia and in less then 24 hours evacuated the entire city of Phnom Penh. This is how  – under the leadership of Pol Pot – the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) regime began, which lasted more the 4 years and during which more then 1,7 million people where killed or died of malnutrition, hard labour and lack of elementary medical help. Approximately one fifth of the entire population of Cambodia was either directly or indirectly annihilated by the Khmer Rouge rule. It was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century.