The Killing Fields

Photographs of prisoners from the S-21 death camp, edited by Chris Riley and Douglas Niven, with memoires of Vann Nath and Sara Colm. Beautifully designed and printed book with 100 Sheet-fed Gravure Plates.

The faces gazing from these pages are those of the soon-to-die, for these photos were taken in S^-21, an institution for the "interrogation" of accused "counterrevolutionaries" in Pol Pot's Cambodia. They show men, women, and children; the last are often shockingly young, and a few women appear with babies. The faces express fear, sadness, fatalism, gallantry in attempts to smile, and even wary anger. Usually, below the face a number is pinned to a shirt; you may find yourself looking hard at a bare-torsoed preadolescent to make sure the pin is taped on the skin rather than pierced, somehow bloodlessly, through it (that is how brutal these pictures are: they make sadism expectable). Of course, there is beauty in these faces and figures, too, which did not save them from revolutionary ideology. Of the 14,000 persons incarcerated in S^-21 between 1975 and 1979, David Chandler says in his afterword, only 7 came out alive. Ray Olson