An-My Lê is a contemporary photographer who primarily focuses on documenting the experiences and landscapes of war. Unlike the photojournalist, who instantly captures the combat and action of war, Lê uses a large format camera to take richly detailed and classically framed photographs that record war’s rehearsals and memories. Her work portrays a different set of temporalities—anticipation, waiting, and recollection—and intertwines the real and the imagined.

Untitled (Vietnam) (1994-1998)

Though born in Saigon, Lê immigrated to the United States as a political refugee in 1975, the last year of the Vietnam War. Her own displacement from Vietnam, as well as her trove of personal memories layered upon popular representations of her former home, inspired her first major photographic project, Untitled (Vietnam) (1994-1998). For this body of work, Lê traveled back to Vietnam and documented the contemporary landscape.

Her immaculate and spare photographs of crumbling buildings, a burning field, or a boy aiming a slingshot skyward invite myriad and oblique references to war. In Untitled, Gai Lai (1994), toy airplanes attached to long sticks and hoisted above a roof like television antennae seem to mime wartime air strikes or perhaps serve as a protective talisman against such attacks. Lê’s series documents and envisages the traces of war in their physical, social, and psychic dimensions.

Small Wars Series (1999-2002)

Her next two photographic projects drew more explicitly on imagination and displacement, specifically as they operate in re-enactments and pre-enactments. Her Small Wars series (1999-2002) centered on Vietnam War re-enactors in North Carolina and Virginia, who carefully re-stage the daily life and battles of soldiers. Lê photographed these re-enactments over two summers. As a condition of access, her participation was required, and she was cast as a Viet Cong captured by American GIs.

29 Palms: Force Recon (2003 -2004)

Lê’s series, 29 Palms: Force Recon (2003-2004), documented military training at a virtual “Middle East” erected in the California desert. In the arid landscape, amid a series of structures built to resemble neighborhoods in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers trained for future combat missions in distant lands.

Her picturesque compositions of the enacted war scenes highlight their constructed nature and generate a contemplative, critical distance from the acts of war. By exploring displacements in space and time — whether 1970s Vietnam in the contemporary South or the Middle East outside of Los Angeles — Lê expresses her personal experiences, which have been dramatically shaped by the processes of war. [1] Her photography signals the multitude of ways that the real and the imagined merge in the acts and memories of wars.

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[1]Rooted in histories of artistic appropriation and performance, the re-enactment has emerged as a key cultural form of the 21st century, used by artists for two common critical purposes: to “rewrite” history by offering a forum for other viewpoints traditionally kept outside the “grand narratives” and to deconstruct the images and accounts that have comprised these narratives. For more on re-enactments, see Robert Blackson, “Once More . . . With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture,” Art Journal 66: 1 (Spring 2007): 28-40.

Art for Rollins: The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art Book Series