As a young girl growing up in wartime Saigon, An-My Lê knew there was one destination that was off-limits—the countryside. In Lê's world, the land surrounding the city was less a setting for a picnic than a place to encounter Vietcong.
This loss of the bucolic and the many other disjunctions of war were a part of Lê's inheritance in 1975 when she fled Vietnam with her parents and came to the United States. To a significant degree, Lê's Vietnam became a Vietnam of the mind, a conflation of family memories, personal conjecture and American media.
Lê, '81, MS '85, has transformed that legacy into an art career in the venerable field of landscape photography. Work from her first monograph, Small Wars (1999-2002), has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Earlier this year she broadened her horizons to Antarctica, where she joined military ships delivering supplies to remote outposts.
Using a large-format camera more characteristic of 19th-century landscape photographers, Lê makes smartly contemporary work that is oblique and conceptual, photographing where war has been or is being rehearsed or re-enacted, rather than the thing itself. The Small Wars exhibit comprises three suites of photographs: a look at the postwar Vietnamese landscape, a series of photographs of men who recreate battles from the Vietnam War in the Virginia and North Carolina countryside, and 29 Palms, an exploration of American soldiers readying for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.
“When you're not looking at the real thing, you can see more clearly,” Lê says without irony. “You start thinking about the lessons learned or not learned. When you know it's not real, you think about the role of movies in perpetrating or glorifying or not glorifying war. And you think of all the literature about war.”
The child of a Vietnamese couple who met while studying in Paris, Lê was born in 1960 in Saigon. Coups, political repression and nightly shelling by the Vietcong were all a routine part of life. In 1968, when the Tet offensive stepped up the violence, she, her mother and two brothers departed for Paris so her mother could pursue a PhD. Her father stayed behind. They returned five years later, but in two years the country fell to the Communists.
At Stanford, Lê seemed to put the past behind her to pursue a career in medicine. She received a bachelor's degree in biology but wasn't admitted to a medical school upon graduation. Advisers counseled her to pursue research and a master's and apply again. While she sought that second degree, she took a photography course with the late Laura Volkerding. The Stanford lecturer helped her become a staff photographer for a craftsmen's guild in France.
“I had no background in the arts at all, but I loved it,” Lê recalls. “I worked with architects and art historians and learned about European architecture and craftsmen whose traditions date to the Middle Ages. It taught me to photograph something in a clear way. It trained me to see in a particular way.”
Upon finishing an MFA at Yale, Lê received a grant to go photograph in Vietnam. Lê says, “I had no idea what to do. I thought I'd collect objects and photograph them. I tried portraits, but they were too specific.” She turned to landscape.
With her own vision of the Vietnamese landscape formed largely by media and fantasy, the initial attraction was to make pictures of the real world that she never knew, Lê says. But soon the two fused, “and the pictures came together.” She adds, “The impetus behind all of my work has been to try to make sense of the disjunctive life I've had. . . . It's always about trying to understand how to do that.”
Lê returned to Vietnam several times during the next four years, and the resulting photographs became the first of the three suites in Small Wars. These photographs from Vietnam are quiet and elegant, with menace lurking in the details. In one, an image of kite fliers in a field in Hanoi, the blurred kites assume the profile of warplanes. Crop fires and construction sites seem to telegraph napalm and mass graves. Often there is a trace sense of events having transpired before the shutter was snapped. Fact and fiction blur. “I made photographs that only use the real to ground the imaginary,” she has said.
By 1999, her inquiry broadened. Lê was searching for ways to incorporate popular imagery of Vietnam into her work when she learned about the Vietnam War re-enactors. The war-game hobbyists would let her photograph them only if she agreed to participate. For the next four summers, Lê found herself in the uncomfortable position of portraying a Vietcong and a turncoat in the re-enactments.
“It was strange and creepy the first few times to put on the black pajamas,” she says. “The idea of the Vietcong is terrifying to me. But you have to get over it. I'm practical. I needed to make those pictures.”
In the re-enactors series, Lê's photographs drop the viewer into a postmodern fun house where faux images of “real” warfare have the effect of questioning the authenticity of all war imagery. The photographer's presence prompts the weekend warriors—none of whom had seen combat—to strike poses they think are authentic, but whose authenticity owes as much to Hollywood depictions of war as the real thing.
As the re-enactment series was concluding, the Iraq War began. Lê applied to be embedded with the troops. Stalled by bureaucracy, she ultimately decided that preparatory war games then under way in the California desert would better serve her purposes. “What would my pictures [in Iraq] say? That war was horrifying? This was a way to explore something from a different angle. I was able to work out issues in my own way.”
The 29 Palms series flipped the re-enactment imagery on its head. This time real soldiers were preparing for real war with artificial games. The work again raises questions about authenticity, but now the crudity of the imitation leaves the viewer wondering why the war doesn't look as it “should.” Night photographs of exploding artillery become dreamscapes.
Karen Irvine, a curator at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography, remembers seeing some of these photographs in a 2005 exhibition. “The ambiguity of Lê's work raises questions about the reliability of seemingly objective historical accounts such as news reports and photographs, which greatly influence how war is communicated and remembered.”
In her recent work, Lê, an assistant professor of photography at Bard College in New York, switched to color photography in Antarctica. Her photos of military ships that are delivering supplies explore notions of empire and military might in the face of the natural world's vastness. She also photographed with a Coast Guard icebreaker in the Bering Sea for three weeks.
Asked whether she will continue to mine memory for landscape, Lê quickly says, “I hope not.” Then she acknowledges, “But I know some artists do the same project for their whole lives.”
JACK FISCHER is a San Jose writer who specializes in the visual arts.
