In 1975 this regular suburban high school was taken over by Pol
Pot's security apparatus and turned into the country's largest
prison/detention centre/place of torture - the infamous S-21.
Between 1975 and 1978 only 7 of 17,000 prisoners are known to
have survived incarceration here. Now it is at once a monument
to the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge, yet still little more than
an ordinary suburban high school. The Khmer Rouge were quite
meticulous in cataloging their efforts; including photographing
all of the detainees. As a keen photographer it is hard to
imagine what was going through the minds of the prison
photographers as they captured what they must have known would
be the last images of these (such ordinary looking) Cambodians.
Possibly most chilling of all are the 14 cells in which the
liberating Vietnamese forces that swept into Phnom Penh in 1979
found freshly tortured victims of the KR. Each cell has a
photograph on the wall of the scene that greeted the invading
troops, plus the entire contents of