Genocide by Numbers
S-21 - Unknown Girl
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
from “I’m Explaining a Few Things” by Pablo Naruda
In her book, “The Discovery of Poetry”, Frances Mayes notes that we expect a poet to use a contrasting comparison after “like” but that Naruda tells us that there can be no simile with more impact than the repetition of “children’s blood.”
The blood of the children in these images did not run through the streets of Naruda ‘s Madrid but through the hallways of Chao Ponhea Yat high school in Phnom Penh, a high school converted by the Khmer Rouge into Security Prison 21 (S-21).
We do not know the names of these children. All we have are the numbers they were assigned and the photographs taken on their arrival at the prison. Of the 17,000 adults, youths and children that entered S-21 between 1975 and 1979 only 12 are known to have come out alive. Genocide by numbers: the paranoid Khmer Rouge destroyed their identities along with their lives needing only to catalog false confessions obtained by torture to justify their actions.
Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) web site provides a searchable database of 5,000 prisoner photographs from S-21, almost all unidentified. All that remains of them is a number and a single black and white picture; 12,000 more do not have even that.
S-21 - Unknown Children
S-21 - Seven Unknown
S-21 - A Phnom Penh high school
Chao Ponhea Yat high school, Security Prison 21, is today the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
I made these pieces in 2003 but I have not published them until now. Seeing my own children in their eyes, I wanted somehow to mark and remember these kids that never grew up, give them a little bit more than just a number. The backgrounds, crying landscapes, come from the Trees, River, Grass, Ranch series made in the Colorado Rockies earlier the same year.
As with all the other images on this site, the profit from any sales will go to charity; for these pictures, Save the Children will always be the beneficiary.
