An-My Lê: Small Wars

An-My Lê was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the United States as a political refugee at age fifteen. She received a grant to return to her homeland just after U.S./Vietnamese relations were formally restored. Lê went back several times in 1994—97, creating stunning large-format, black-and-white photographs, expertly printed in a middle-gray scale reminiscent of Robert Adams. These images do not address the war specifically, but rather represent Lê’s attempt to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape that now confronted her. The war haunts the images in eerie metaphors: dozens of kites double as dive-bombing planes; crop fires and construction sites recall napalm and mass graves.

In 1999 Lê began working with Vietnam War reenactors in North Carolina who restage battles as well as the training and daily life of soldiers—both Viet Cong and American GIs. For four summers, she not only photographed but also participated in battles of the Vietnam War restaged on her adopted American soil. Relating to both documentary and staged photography, the work is aesthetically rigorous and conceptually challenging. Soldiers at rest give themselves up to portraiture, while battle compositions recognizable from classic war photojournalism possess the qualities of a dream. Most recently, Lê has photographed exercises performed by the U.S. military in the American desert in preparation for maneuvers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Small Wars collects these three eloquent series in one volume. As a trilogy, the works brilliantly elucidate the complicated nature of the aesthetics and spectacle of war. But perhaps the most intriguing conceptual component is Lê’s own relationship to the subjects and the landscapes she presents.

The book is supported by the Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial and in recognition of the valuable cultural contributions of artists to society. Small Wars also received support from the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 128
Number of images: 0
Publication date: 2005-10-15
Measurements: 11.75 x 8.75 x 0.74 inches
ISBN: 9781931788823

Richard B. Woodward is a New York-based arts critic who contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. His journalism has appeared in numerous publications, from the Atlantic, Bookforum, Film Comment, The American Scholar, and the New Yorker to Vanity Fair, Interview, and Vogue. His essays on art and photography have been featured in more than 20 monographs and museum catalogs.
An-My Lê’s work has been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lê has received many awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997), and MacArthur Foundation (2012). She is a professor in the Department of Photography at Bard College.
Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic. He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker magazine.