An-My Lê: Small Wars

The twentieth anniversary edition of An-My Lê’s acclaimed first book Small Wars, reissued with five new images and an afterword by Ocean Vuong.

For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. 

First published in 2005, Small Wars brings together three interconnected series. In Viêt Nam, Lê returns to the country she left in her teens and attempts to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape; in Small Wars, she engages a small community of Vietnam War reenactors; and in 29 Palms, she documents the preparations of marines in the California desert as they undergo training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. 

With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work. The twentieth anniversary edition of Small Wars is a lush reissue of the original, with five additional images and a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 144
Number of images: 80
Publication date: 2025-05-27
Measurements: 11.75 x 8.75 inches
ISBN: 9781597115773

An-My Lê (born in Saigon, Vietnam, 1960) is a Vietnamese American photographer, filmmaker, author, and the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. Lê came to the United States as a political refugee at age fifteen. She received a grant to return to her homeland just after US-Vietnamese relations were formally restored, and traveled there several times between 1994 and 1997. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation, and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently a major retrospective of her work was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is based in New York.
Richard B. Woodward was an arts critic whose essays on art and photography were featured in dozens of monographs, catalogs, and publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic, Bookforum, Film Comment, American Scholar, New Yorker, and Vogue.
Hilton Als is a staff writer and theater critic at the New Yorker. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, he is the author of The Women (1996), White Girls (2013), and Joan Didion: What She Means (2022). He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University.
Ocean Vuong is author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) and Time Is a Mother (2022), and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and is professor of creative writing at New York University.