Phnom Penh, Cambodia Part II

Four three-storied school buildings face a large open courtyard. They are painted the same warm ochre color as many colonial-looking buildings you find throughout central Phnom Penh. They remind you of your Freshman dorm, despite the warm tones they share a bauhaus flair for the cold practicalties of boxes. The first classroom you enter on the ground floor in building A is empty except for the bare metal frame of a cot. Lying on the cot are lengths of metal rebar with links of chain attached to large eyelets, a corroded metal box. Then you notice a blown up unframed photo hanging on the wall just beyond the bed, like something Andy Warhol would have silkscreened in foursquare: a darkly reproduced photo of a mutilated body lying half in half out of the bed frame. Throughout the building you find more of the same. The windows have all been outfitted with bars, but the southern light bleeds through the open windows from the shophouses across the street and bathe the ochre walls and the maroon and gold checkered tile floors in a soft glow. In some rooms the old blackboards are still there with a palimpsest of inscrutable drawings and writings. You notice the dark stains in corners and seeping from the ceilings, rust or blood or mould you cannot tell. Bolts pounded into walls to create makeshift constraints, so many strangely emotive textures like you'd find in nine-inch-nails album art. And you think oh the dark dark tropes that pop likes to play with, and then you worry what does it say about you that you're initial reactions lie in the purely aesthetic.

In building B, the classrooms have been divided into makeshift cells divided by brick or wood walls, the cells no bigger than a restroom stall. The balconies looking over the courtyard lined with lengths of barbed wire. You feel like you shouldn't be taking photos, but then everyone else is, and you think maybe we are all here bearing witness regardless of what drew us here in the first place: morbid fascination, guilt, history, a history of collective guilt.

In the next building, the ground floor is a gallery of photos, hundreds of headshots, a gallery of stoic glances on either side of you, punctuated by photos of mass graves and aftermaths, scenes discovered by the Vietnamese forces after the Khmer Rouge fled. Then there are bones and paintings recreating the actual acts. Tools. Some expat photographer has created a series playing with the quality of light in the classrooms and the reflections seen off the glass cases in the gallery of photos, he claims he is giving the spirits voice by imagining a dialog between the long dead prisoners and the latter day museum-goers captured in the reflections.

On the top floor of the last building you finally find substantive text, a narrative beyond an abandoned crime scene. A series with portraits and testimonials from relatives, lovers, friends of the killed. Brothers, sisters, sons, daughters disappeared. You notices phrases repeated: "He was a kind man" "She was proud to join the revolution" "Joining the army seemed a better option then toiling in the fields." In another room portraits of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge and this place Toul Sleng (S21) central detention and interrogation center for the Khmer Rouge. Their portraits are covered in graffiti, all in khmer script you can only imagine the anger and rage through the scratched out eyes and mouths. In another classroom a child of the killing fields now a photojournalist has created portraits and interviews of former prison guards of this very compound. Their old black and white IDs, young teenage boys and girls unsmiling in there severe uniforms, accompanied with their present day photos, now fathers and wives, a woman gives alms to a monk, a man picnics with his family, another man tends to his field. They all seem to say the same thing, we did what we were told, otherwise we would have been killed. All these voices bring the things you have seen to the human scale of emotion and empathy, a hundred rooms, so much hysteria and fear and anger and loss that still lingers and it becomes all too much to take in at once.