An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. She received her BAS and MS degrees in biology from Stanford University in 1981 and 1985. She had also received an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1993. An-My Lê's photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures frame a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields. Projects include "Viêt Nam", in which Lê’s memories of a war-torn countryside are reconciled with the contemporary landscape; "Small Wars", in which Lê photographed and participated in Vietnam War reenactments in Virginia and North Carolina; and "29 Palms", in which United States Marines preparing for deployment play-act scenarios in a virtual Middle East in the California desert. These three projects were brought together in a monograph titled "Small Wars," published by Aperture. Suspended between the formal traditions of documentary and staged photography, Lê’s work explores the disjunction between wars as historical events and the ubiquitous representation of war in contemporary entertainment, politics, and collective consciousness. In November 2014, her second book, Events Ashore, was published by Aperture. Events Ashore depicts a 9-year exploration of the US Navy working throughout the world. The project began when the artist was invited to photograph US naval ships preparing for deployment to Iraq, the first in a series of visits to battleships, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, and scientific missions in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Small Wars. New York: Aperture, 2005. Essay by Richard B. Woodward. Interview by Hilton Als.
Events Ashore. New York: Aperture, 2014. Essay by Geoff Dyer.
Works
Viêt Nam
Small Wars – An album of photos she took between 1999 and 2002 during a reenactment of the Vietnam War. The photos were primarily taken in black and white and portray different scenes that portray battles from the Vietnam War.
2006: Small Wars: Photographs by An-My Lê, Marion Center, Santa Fe, NM; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, traveling to National Media Museum, Bradford, UK; Ffotogallery, Cardiff, Wales, UK; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID
