Photographer documents cultural conflicts ‘On Contested Terrain’
An-My Lê, a Vietnamese American photographer, seeks the best vantage point for documenting cultural conflicts playing out in public spaces, along the U.S.-Mexico border or the Oval Office set built for “Saturday Night Live.”
“When you step back too far, you lose tension. It’s always about finding how far you can go back,” the artist said in a telephone interview from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
To the 60-year-old photographer, a landscape is a theater. Her carefully composed images show the vast deserts and oceans where America’s soldiers and sailors serve and train. She is equally adept at capturing where Confederate statues wind up once they are removed.
Dan Leers, Carnegie Museum of Art’s curator of photography, organized the first retrospective of the artist’s work. “An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain” features more than 100 photographs and was scheduled to open March 14, the date when the museum closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s now a virtual show with video at cmoa.org.
The photographer’s work “invites audiences to consider the impact of conflict and how those conflicts continue to shape our cultural narrative,” Mr. Leers said.
Ms. Lê’s images are inspired by the landscape tradition of Timothy O’Sullivan, who photographed the aftermath of Civil War battles, and Eugene Atget, the Frenchman who recorded the architecture of Paris at the turn of the 20th century.
Using a large-format Deardorff camera, Ms. Lê documented U.S.
Marines training in the Mojave Desert before heading off to Iraq, civilians reenacting the Vietnam War in Virginia and North Carolina, and students protesting gun violence in New York City.
The artist often takes her pictures high above the scene to create layered images with multiple meanings.
“I am always looking for the fault lines,” Ms. Lê said.
“My interest in the landscape is also connected to the work that people do within the landscape. It suggests something about history, it suggests something about culture,” said the artist, whose photographs also show migrant workers harvesting asparagus or pruning pomegranate trees in California.
From the day of her birth in 1960, war ravaged her native
Vietnam. The U.S. military airlifted her family out of Saigon in 1975, and they settled in California. That formative experience fueled her interest in the prologue to war and its aftermath.
“Being aware of multiple agendas has made me comfortable with contradictions. Contradictions make me tick. They are what motivate me to go out there and to try to understand and to see for myself. The camera gave me courage,” Ms. Lê said.
At Stanford University, she trained as an immunologist, earned a master’s degree in biology and secured a spot in medical school. Then a photography course with Laura Volkerding changed her life.
“She was a large-format view photographer, a stern person of few words,” Ms. Lê recalled.
When Ms. Volkerding encouraged her to attend a graduate photography program, she enrolled at Yale University.
The photographer suffers from a fear of missing out.
During the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, “I felt that I needed to be out there, just as I wanted to go to Iraq when we invaded in 2003. Right now, I wish I was in a hospital.”
Experience, however, has taught her that patience often rewards an artist. In the spring and summer of 2015, she was working outside New Orleans, where she was invited to shoot the making of a Hollywood film, “Free State of Jones.” Set during the Civil War, the movie stars Matthew McConaughey as a disillusioned Confederate Army deserter who leads a revolt against the Confederate government.
While the film was being made, conflict erupted over the nation’s Civil War monuments. In December 2015, the New Orleans City Council voted to remove Confederate monuments to P.G.T. Beauregard, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.
The photographer’s goal was to capture the moment when workers removed them in 2017.
“I tried to photograph them. It was done under the cloak of night. I had to go back and forth. I kept missing the taking down,” she recalled.
A break came in July 2017, when “someone decided to be helpful . ... I was able to find Gen. Lee and Beauregard in the shed.”
Seeing the statues in public squares and then consigned to a Homeland Security storage shed in New Orleans is “pretty extraordinary” because of “the sense of history that they carry and what they represent,” she said.