An-My Lê

Biography

In 1999, to gain access to re-enactments of the Vietnam War in North Carolina and Virginia, An-My Lê agreed to take the field herself: for three summers, on weekends, she played an enemy fighter. The participants, most of whom had never served in the military, valued the authenticity she brought. That is how the series “Small Wars” came about.

She was born in 1960 in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. After the start of the Tet Offensive in 1968, her mother took her and her two brothers to Paris, where she had a scholarship at the Sorbonne. The family returned to South Vietnam in early 1973, after the withdrawal of American troops. As a child Lê lived through night bombardments. In early 1975 her father and the three children were evacuated by the Americans, and her mother followed a few months later. According to one account, she was flown out by helicopter from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon at the end of April. The family settled in Southern California; according to other accounts, Lê spent some time on American bases in the Philippines, on Wake Island and on Guam, and then in Sacramento.

She studied biology at Stanford University, taking a bachelor’s degree in 1981 and a master’s in 1985. She meant to go on to medical school, but after a photography course she chose a different path. In 1986 a Paris guild of church and palace builders, which was then engaged in preserving and documenting buildings, hired her as a photographer. For four years Lê travelled around France, learning to handle a camera in practice. In 1990 she returned to the United States and enrolled at the Yale School of Art, where she received her Master of Fine Arts in 1993.

In 1994, after the United States and Vietnam restored diplomatic relations, she visited her homeland for the first time in almost twenty years.

Lê wanted to compare her childhood memories, and the image of Vietnam created by American cinema, with what she saw for herself. The series “Viêt Nam” (1994–1998) consists of black-and-white photographs: a schoolgirl at work in the fields, landscapes, towns and villages. She used a bellows camera, which, as she felt, set her apart from journalists and marked her as an artist.

In “Small Wars” (1999–2002) she showed quiet moments: a man wiping sweat from his forehead, a group deep in the woods, an explosion. The next series, “29 Palms” (2003–2004), was made at a Marine Corps training base in California. Lê had wanted to go to Iraq as an embedded correspondent with the troops, but applied too late. At the base, the conditions of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were simulated; the pictures are built on the play of light and shadow, of fences and barbed wire, of night explosions.

In 2006, commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, she photographed a rock quarry north of New York City (“Trap Rock”). Her book “Small Wars” was published by Aperture in 2005, and the second, “Events Ashore”, by the same publisher in November 2014. It represents nine years of photographing the US Navy: ships preparing for deployment to Iraq, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, scientific missions in the Arctic and Antarctic. Here she worked in colour for the first time. One picture, of sailors at muster in an Indonesian port, she jokingly called her Canaletto.

Since 2015 Lê has been working on the series “Silent General”. The starting point was the shooting at a church in Charleston; the series touches on the Civil War, racial tension and the fate of monuments. The title comes from a late essay by Walt Whitman on Ulysses S. Grant. One photograph shows the monuments to the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard in New Orleans, standing in a wooden storage shed after their removal.

Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997), the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Award (2007), a Tiffany Comfort Foundation fellowship (2010) and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2012). Her work was shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial; in 2020–2021 the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh held the exhibition “On Contested Terrain”, and in 2023–2024 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held “Between Two Rivers”. Lê has taught at Bard College since 1998.