Back to Blog
Real war pictures5/26/2023 ![]() ![]() Lê, who was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975, created Small Wars to explore, as she describes it, “the Vietnam of the mind.” Although she has vivid memories of the conflict’s waning days from her teenage years in Saigon, she also knows the war, like many of us, through a variety of sources including history textbooks, movies (_Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket_, and so on.), magazines, travel, museum exhibitions, newspapers, and perhaps the experiences of relatives or friends. These dramatizations of war (one a reenactment, one a rehearsal) allow her to create a unique kind of war imagery-one that is unexpected, removed, and revelatory. ![]() ![]() Lê’s current series, 29 Palms (2003-present), documents a military base of the same name located in the California desert, it is where soldiers train before being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Her series Small Wars (1999-2002) depicts men who spend their weekends reenacting battles from the Vietnam War in the forests of Virginia. Instead of addressing her subject by creating reportage images of actual shocking events, she photographs places where war is psychologically anticipated, processed, and relived. The artist approaches these events obliquely. This exhibition comprises two photographic series by An-My Lê that explore the military conflicts that have framed the last half-century of American history: the war in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |