An-My Lê

Why Photography? Holding Exilic Memory and the Present Landscape in the Same Frame

Lê grew up in Saigon and fled the country with her family in 1975, later settling in the United States as a political refugee. She studied biology at Stanford University, moved toward art after taking photography courses, and received an MFA from Yale University in 1993^*2. When she returned to Vietnam in 1994 after an absence of about nineteen years, she realized that the memories sustained during exile did not correspond to the country before her. She has recalled that an exile's memory, cut off from direct access to its culture, had proved unreliable; after returning, she repeatedly revisited the same places with a large-format camera^*24. She was encouraged to photograph the effects of Agent Orange and sites associated with the war, but concluded that such subjects would reduce the conflict to familiar signs and predetermine the Vietnam she was trying to find^*23. In Viêt Nam, she photographed rice fields, rivers, cities, labor, and leisure, examining how personal memory, regional histories, and postwar daily life occupied the same terrain. Art21 likewise identifies her return as the starting point for comparing a remembered homeland with postwar life through landscape^*3。

. Photography did not serve here as proof that memory was accurate. Lê has observed that photographs are tied to truth while also remaining fictions constructed through framing and distance^*23. A verbal account of home can smooth over the discrepancies between memory and the present landscape. A photograph can retain rice-field labor, vegetation, buildings, and distant views as concrete facts of the present while leaving their relation to the past unresolved. As the record of her Harvard lecture suggests, repeated visits with a cumbersome view camera created room for childhood, war, and older histories to appear contingently within a single landscape^*24. The return thus became a way of measuring how far memory had drifted from a real place, instead of an act of recovering an intact homeland. From there, Lê moved beyond her own memories to examine how American culture remembers the Vietnam War through cinema, news photography, and reenactment.

The Large-Format Camera: Describing War Through People, Terrain, and Institutions

Lê chose a large-format camera to step away from the speed that turns war into immediate news and to observe people, military machinery, terrain, sky, and vegetation as a single spatial field. She has explained that the view camera records minute information on a large negative and describes an experiential space in which even the air between objects can be sensed^*23. She experimented with more mobile cameras, but found that they could not hold the multiple layers of time, distance, and memory present in the landscape, and returned to the cumbersome large-format camera^*24. Setting a tripod and taking time to examine composition and focus shifts attention away from chasing an event toward watching what prepares war and which terrain makes military action possible. As SFMOMA notes, Lê treats landscape itself as a site where war is prepared, performed, and remembered^*5. The camera's slowness is inseparable from this subject: it leaves soldiers, the land that enables training, equipment, vegetation, light, and the photographer's position at the same level of resolution. Art21 places the work between documentary and staged photography because the realities she photographs have already been constructed through military exercises, reenactment, and preexisting images of war^*2。

Small Wars: The Vietnam War Performed by Others

Small Wars (1999–2002) photographs Vietnam War reenactments staged in American forests. The participants do more than imitate historical events. Through equipment, assigned roles, terrain, and memories shaped by film and news photography, they produce scenes that look recognizably like the Vietnam War. As a condition of being allowed to photograph, Lê was also asked to participate and played the role of a Viet Cong soldier^*21. Because the positions of photographer, refugee with personal memories of the war, and reenactor overlap, the series settles into neither an outside ethnographic observation nor a private act of remembrance. The Museum of Contemporary Photography explains that she avoided shocking combat reportage and photographed places where war is psychologically anticipated, processed, and relived^*6. Quiet woods, smoke, weapons, and ambushes share the same tonal register, making the landscape itself the stage on which an image of war is produced.

29 Palms: Military Training as an Image of War Before Combat

29 Palms (2003–04) follows Marines preparing for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan at a training ground in the California desert. In MoMA's Infantry Platoon (Machine Gunners), soldiers and a machine gun occupy part of the frame, with a vast expanse of arid land extending behind them^*7. The activity is real military work, yet targets, mock villages, and role-play anticipate a future battlefield. Lê has explained that black and white separated the images from contemporary color news coverage and connected the exercise to a longer image history that includes the Vietnam War and nineteenth-century war photography^*4. In Mortar Impact, the explosion becomes a dramatic center while the scale of the terrain also relativizes its force^*8. The series avoids reducing its subject to a choice between military heroism and antiwar critique. It describes the combined system of training, imagination, technology, and environment that makes war possible.

Events Ashore: The Navy's Global Reach in Color

For Events Ashore (2005–14), Lê accompanied the U.S. Navy and photographed exercises, transportation, relief work, scientific research, and humanitarian operations across all seven continents. Aperture's photobook presents the many forms through which military power becomes present worldwide in disaster response, diplomacy, logistics, and technical assistance as well as combat^*14。《Suez Canal Transit, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, Egypt is a five-part work that presents a massive aircraft carrier, the canal, and the surrounding land as one continuous field of vision^*10. Her earlier black-and-white photographs linked memories, reenactments, and exercises associated with the Vietnam War to earlier war photography. Events Ashore addresses an active contemporary navy coming into contact with different climates, cities, waters, and civilian activities. Lê has said that she initially felt like “a black-and-white photographer taking color pictures,” before learning to use color psychologically and descriptively^*25. The gray of ships, blue water, uniforms, relief supplies, and local vegetation preserve the specific relations between military activity and each environment instead of compressing the armed forces into a single symbol. The move to color shifted the emphasis from layered memory toward a description of the present in which military power, diplomacy, resources, and labor operate simultaneously.

Silent General and the Recurrence of History

Silent General brings together Civil War monuments, film production, borderlands, environmental disasters, protest movements, and the political spaces of the capital in a sequence of chapters. Its title comes from Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, and the work favors a structure in which the past recurs in contemporary places over a linear chronology^*11. MoMA's Fourteen Views places photographs from Vietnam, France, Louisiana, and elsewhere across a monumental continuous surface, producing a fractured view of history that differs from nineteenth-century panoramas designed to make military victory visible at a glance^*1. The series, shown at Marian Goodman Gallery, likewise treats the legacy of the Civil War and contemporary politics as arrangements embedded in land^*19。

Dong Thap: A Landscape Where Memory and the Present Do Not Coincide

Dong Thap, Southern Vietnam (1994) views riverside vegetation and human activity from a distance, offering few direct markers of war. The Met identifies it as a photograph made after Lê's return and describes its memory-like or dreamlike quality^*9. The lack of explicit information does not erase history. It preserves, in detailed photographic form, the experience of seeing one's conviction that one knows a homeland collapse before the present landscape. Lê's engagement with war imagery begins here, and the impossibility of directly recovering the past remains central to her later photographs of reenactment and training.

29 Palms: Disturbing the Military Sublime from Within

29 Palms presents desert, mountains, nocturnal flashes, and armored vehicles as a grand visual field. Such beauty can make military power seductive, and Lê has consistently addressed the problem of aestheticizing war, including in her Art21 discussion of the series^*4. At the same time, soldiers and vehicles often appear small against the expanse of the terrain, and the fiction of training remains visible. Scholar Bogumiła Kowalczyk has analyzed Small Wars and 29 Palms in terms of invisible violence haunting the American landscape^*17. The work's critical force lies less in eliminating beauty than in asking viewers to recognize the moment when beauty and military domination become intertwined.

Reading the Series Through Photobooks and Exhibitions

The 2005 photobook Small Wars brought Viêt Nam, Small Wars, and 29 Palms together in three sections, establishing a structure through which return, reenactment, and predeployment training could be read as one problem. Prix Pictet's artist profile similarly describes the trilogy as roughly a decade of work on the myths and memories of war^*18. The Carnegie Museum of Art's 2020 exhibition On Contested Terrain assembled more than one hundred works from seven series to consider landscape photography, military imagery, and diaspora together^*11. MoMA's 2023 exhibition included video, embroidery, and sculpture alongside photography, showing how images of war circulate through cinema, journalism, decorative forms, and exhibition space^*1。

The Risk of Beautifying War and the Function of Distance

Lê's precise large-format photographs and balanced compositions can render military exercises and weapons visually compelling. The artist herself has repeatedly examined this risk as a problem of “aestheticizing war”^*4. In an Aperture interview, she discusses the relation among memories of Vietnam, the confusion of war, and memories made accessible through photography^*13. Her distance can soften the immediacy of suffering, yet it also prevents a single casualty or explosion from standing in for history. Land, labor, institutions, and the war films already present in viewers' memories return to the field of vision. Lê's selections for The Met's Artist Project, in which she interprets other artists' images of war, landscape, and power, further show that she understands her own work within a long visual culture^*22. The New Yorker identified the way conflict becomes embedded in physical and psychological terrain through reenactment, training, and film sets as a central concern of the MoMA retrospective^*16. When Lê says that photography is equated with truth but that every photograph is also a fiction, she is not arguing for the fabrication of events. Framing, distance, light, access, and the sequence of a series shape what counts as war; the ethical task is to make that construction perceptible rather than conceal it^*23。

War Photography Beyond the Front Line

Lê's historical position rests on more than the paradox of addressing war without photographing a battlefield. She treats a reenactors' forest, a predeployment desert, naval supply routes, monuments under removal, film crews, and protesting students as connected sites that produce images of conflict. In a conversation with The Brooklyn Rail, she calls herself a landscape photographer and places military intervention within longer histories of violence^*15. The Carnegie Museum of Art catalogue describes her work as connecting the landscape tradition with the complexities of war^*12. MoMA's organization of the work from Viêt Nam to Silent General through the structure “Between Two Rivers” likewise evaluates it as an art of movement and opposition in which multiple places and histories act at once, instead of as a chronological account of individual wars^*20. Lê demonstrated that war photography can address training, logistics, environment, media, and memory—the systems that sustain conflict—as well as evidence from the front. The purpose of working away from the battlefield lies in bringing what she has called “universal history, personal history, and cultural history” into view at the same time within a single terrain^*24。