ABSTRACT
Sion dark tourism itinerary took him to the two most frequently visited and well promoted sites, the former S-21 detention centre and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. They elaborate; the genocide is rendered spatially to the Tuol Sleng-Choeung Ek nexus, suggesting that the violence was confined geographically. At S-21, the classrooms in two other buildings were converted into isolation cells, each cubicle measuring three by four feet and the cubicle-like cells are divided from each other using the ubiquitous hollow terracotta-coloured bricks that one sees all over Cambodia. In a ground-floor room, one is confronted with numerous boards displaying galleries of photographs of Tuol Sleng prisoners. The photographs are front-on portraits and are credited as having been taken by the then teenage Nhem Ein, Tuol Slengs chief photographer, who worked with six apprentices. The portraits can stand for one thing: death. The retrospective gaze occasions a type of secondary violence, which Williams captures well when he writes.
