Analysis of 'Photographs from S-21'

Photographs From S-21 is a powerful short play, which tells us the story of two photographs of horror on display in a controversial exhibition in a New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The enlarged photographs on the wall are historical documents of two victims of the Khmer Rouge in their secret prison. The photographs present us these two individuals standing only dressed in black pajamas’ and ID tags upon their arrival – the beginning of the end, you could say.

We are introduced to each a male- and a female-presenting photograph facing each other on opposite walls.

Through the play the characters get to know each other through their sharing of memories of before and during the genocide of Khmer Rouge. In their sharing they speak of their arrival, their losses, their pain and their end. How “their blood joined the others blood on the floor.”

Photographs from S-21 doesn’t imagine the audience of the photographs (as well as the audience of the play) as mere viewers. It doesn’t portrait us and these insignificant museum-goers as what we and they are, but rather presents us as in the eyes of the characters. What they see and what they saw. What they saw the moment their blindfold was removed and their vision directed towards their executioner. As they, in fact, are facing their eradicators in the lens of the camera, and we just stare back from the place of their executioners.