A Conversation with An-My Lê
By J.p. Lawrence
Bard Professor of Photography An-My Lê uses the mode of landscape photography to negotiate the complexities of the American military and its ventures abroad, while also deciphering national conceptions, memories, and fantasies of war. Her book, “Small Wars,” contains three photo essays: “Vietnam,” about going home to Vietnam; “Small Wars,” about Vietnam War re-enactors, and “29 Palms,” about Marines training for Iraq. Lê’s work has earned her the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which comes with a $500,000 five-year grant. The MacArthur Foundation awards individuals working across fields who are “committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”
The Bard Free Press met with Lê to discuss her investigation.
Free Press: You’ve said you want to portray war in a more complicated and challenging way. How does one do that when the concept of war has so much baggage?
An-My Lê: It’s not so much about how war is portrayed; I think with “Small Wars” I was interested in exploring the ideas of the memory of war—I wanted to explore that.
Because for young people, Vietnam is such a myth, and it’s perpetuated in movies. It’s kept alive in people’s imagination and numerous novels and books. With “29 Palms,” I’m interested in the idea of preparation for war. We train militarily, but are we thinking about if are we ready morally? Are we ready economically to step into a war? Are we ready to deal with the consequences? Not photographing combat and war itself as it happens allows you to do that. Because I’m photographing training. I’m photographing something that is not the immediate action—it’s one step back.
FP: In your photos of Vietnam War re-enactors, what struck me was how you gave these people dignity, but not glory, necessarily.
AL: I’m glad you said that, because when I first discovered them and told my friends about them, everyone just jumped all over me and said, ‘You gotta publish these in this magazine or that magazine!’ And I was tempted, and then I knew immediately that they would turn them into parodies and make fun of them and it would have been too easy, because they are extreme and they’re sort of koo-koos, in a way. But it would have been a simplistic treatment.
FP: How do you feel about the re-enactors?
AL: Reenactment is a phenomenon in itself and it has nothing to do with real war and real combat. It has to do with the idea of war, in this country, more than war itself. So it has to do with the idea of how war is represented, the idea of how war stories are told. It has to do with the memories of war.
Some of those young men had fathers who had been in Vietnam, and some had brothers, perhaps. As boys they played war with toy guns, and they collect things—badges, knives, uniforms sometimes, flags of various battles.
And so it’s taking all of that to an extreme, and you actually wear all of that stuff and you create a scenario and you create a narrative and you meet other people who are just as interested you can play together and exchange the gear. It has nothing to do with real war.
FP: After that, you went to take photographs of Marines training for Iraq. Was that different from taking photos of re-enactors?
AL: Oh, absolutely. It’s like day and night; it’s two completely different experiences. I keep thinking, “could I do the reenactments after having done 29 Palms?” and my first reaction is “no.” I would have been so dismissive of it all because I felt like, “Well I met the real people and the real soldiers.”
FP: I was struck by how you took a photo of tanks in the desert, but the immensity of the mountains and sky made the tanks look small, like toys.
AL: Well, it has to do with the scale, you know. I could have just focused on the tank, but I’m always more interested in giving context to the military endeavors. It’s about putting military endeavors within the context of the landscape. So it does make you question the endeavor of war, the activities of war, and think about the futility of war, because there’s something greater than us that we can’t control in the end.
FP: So it’s not like the traditional war photography, which is close-ups of the shock and awe of war.
AL: But that’s important too, because I think combat photographers interested in the individual story, and that’s something that happened in Vietnam. It was important to tell the soldier’s story, and say how awful war is, and how devastating it is. And it is.
FP: You’re not trying to show the story of the individual, so whose story are you trying to tell?
AL: I’m interested in the military as an enterprise, so it’s important to put it in context and the landscape is helping giving it context.
FP: What happens when one portrays the military without context?
AL: Taken out of context things can be simplified—maybe too much. And I work visually, with only images and minimal titles. I think it’s possible to approach a subject in a complicated way with only images, and that’s what I tried to do. It’s important to give context. One of the ways to do that is to use scale, whether it’s a landscape or in a portrait. It’s about the individual, his or her own psychology and individuality within the context of the workspace and within the context of the environment—that’s a question of scale as well.
FP: What about the individual behind the camera? How does that psychology fit into the context of the piece?
AL: Obviously this work I’m making is very personal. I grew up in Vietnam, during a war. My life, or my early life, has been influenced by conflict, and so that’s what drives the work. But I always hope that my personal agenda is transcended in the pictures, and I think it is.
FP: As far as challenging portrayals of war, do you ever get people who want you to ‘expose’ the military or show the horrors of war or show that war is good or bad?
AL: Well, it’s complicated. Perhaps the idea is that I don’t have one single message. People always expect a single message. All I’m interested in is to show what the military does, and to make you question the endeavor.
And if you think the military is wasteful, then I think you can sort of see that, and it’s good that you think that, but don’t expect me to bring you a picture that spells [it] out.
But there are fascinating aspects to the [military], and I’d like to show that. The gear is amazing, a lot of the young people are so dedicated and so amazing.
And there are things that are questionable. You assume the military is all-powerful, but I’d like to show contradictions in it—how fragile and how perhaps futile some of the things are. I think it’s all there; I’m trying to pull it all together.