On the Photography of An-My Lê

Director Stanley Kubrick's legendary fear of flying confined him to the U.K., where he constructed massive studio sets to replicate a snowbound Colorado hotel, battlefields in Vietnam, and finally upper-class Manhattan. Photographer An-My Lê first came to public attention with her series “Twenty Nine Palms” , a body of work that upon first encounter resembled the participation of American forces on various fronts in the Middle East. However, the title instructs us that they are not documents of conflict but rehearsals for battle held at Twelve Palms California, a staging area for military exercises. In the mid 1990s Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time since the war with little reference points beyond a few family photographs and a cinema-infused memory informed by films Apocalypse Now and Kubrick's shot in Britain Full Metal Jacket . Lê made a number of decisions and proceeded to do what photographers do, translating one kind of fact into another form of fiction. The use of black and white locates every image within precise detail: a humid jungle's foreground of vegetation looks as magical as a Paul Klee, a beautiful child halts for the camera on another forest path, a fire burns by a river where in another picture multinational companies advertise a new economy. “Scars of War” tropes are kept mostly offstage but still inform the subject from afar; we strain to read the graffiti on a pockmarked wall, denizens of Ho Chi Minh City gather to look at something in the sky, a building in delicate balance has survived the last century intact. The ironies of aestheticized ruin (or “ruin porn”)—be they from Detroit, New Orleans, or Havana—are not apparent in An-My Lê's Vietnam images and there is some relief in this; we approach them instead with a sense of discovery, and at least from my generation, avid curiosity mixed with a degree of guilt.

Tim Maul