The Brooklyn Rail

“The door gunner leaned over and, shouting above the engine noise, offered Claypool a hundred bucks for the camera around his neck. His girl had been begging him for months, she wanted to see some photographs of what it was really like.”

–Stephen Wright, Meditations in Green

They called the Vietnam War the “television war” because it went into almost every American home night after night. But it was also the photographic war, because not only was it a focus for global photojournalism but many of the US soldiers who fought there carried cameras—everything from Leicas to Instamatics. (The North Vietnamese also took photographs, but that requires telling a different story.) While the photojournalists used the camera to describe events—tragic, baffling, savage, comic or bizarre—those fighting used it as a kind of talisman, to gain some measure of control over the fear, trauma, anger, and moral freefall that was their experience of the war.

An-My Lê’s photographs, whether in black and white from her early projects or in more recent large-format color, are measured and precise. They feel far more restrained and “objective” than the most conventional documentary work. But behind them I sense the constant tension of someone using the camera as a tool of immense strength and control, to gain purchase on difficult emotions. She confronts and symbolizes loss, displacement, and anger in pursuit of an ultimate goal far more demanding than critique. Her photographs tell me that she is the rarest thing that the disruption of the war could produce: a soldier of love.

To say that love requires courage and determination would be an understatement. Lê’s family lived in Saigon and Hue, and after the Tet Offensive in 1968, in which North Vietnamese troops attacked across South Vietnam, tearing apart the last vestige of American military invincibility, Lê, her mother and two brothers departed to Paris, where her mother studied at the Sorbonne. They returned with the signing of a peace accord in 1973, only to flee again when the North Vietnamese ended the conflict by invading and defeating the South Vietnamese army. Almost as soon as it was politically possible for her to return, in 1994, Lê, by now a Yale MFA graduate, brought with her a large format camera and tripod and black and white film. The photographs she produced are quiet and often distant. They only hint at past conflict, as well as present some obvious ironies—billboards of global electronic brands along the river in Ho Chi Minh City, for example. Yet the process of using such a camera slows the flow of time and emotion, even as it promotes the parallel acts of inspection and reflection. In this time that is no time, associations build, and the past emerges into the present.

These photographs occupy an important place in the archive of trauma, along with similar projects of photographic recovery by Jo Ractliffe in Angola, Mikail Levin at Auschwitz, and Dawoud Bey along the Underground Railroad in the United States. They all marvel at how time moves on, how human beings—those who survive and those who come after—persist, and how traces remain but, like memory, may eventually be effaced. In Lê’s case, however, the way she worked and the perspective she developed seem to have opened the door to a more comprehensive understanding of war and society. Her series “29 Palms” and “Small Wars” document various war simulations staged by US soldiers and Vietnam re-enactors. On several occasions Lê herself entered the frame to play an enemy combatant. Her wide-angle views, especially, merge the war preparations into a sense of continuous conflict, where the people and the society caught up in this cycle are doomed to repeat themselves over and over, as a form of PTSD, without catharsis or transformation.

This sense of things, which was amplified as Lê began to use color in the 2000s, seems only to have made her more appreciative of the human reality that lies behind events. Even as she has expanded her interest in landscape photography as a socially and politically signifying form, portraiture too has become ever more urgent an imperative in her photography. Or perhaps the color work simply makes this more obvious. Whether it is a soldier in combat training, a retired firefighter in Brooklyn, or a high school student protesting gun violence in New York, Lê’s camera attends to the person as type and figure. This photographic fidelity bears traces of August Sander and more immediately Judith Joy Ross, but the deeper influence is probably Walt Whitman. The title of Lê’s ongoing project “Silent General” refers to Whitman’s description of Ulysses S. Grant and the poet’s further meditations on the Civil War, the nation, and the land itself.

Partly in response to her anxiety at the growing sense of political division and the persistence of racism in the United States, Lê seems to have set out to find an answer to her own misgivings and perhaps to confront a renewed sense of trauma. Her travels, from Washington Square Park to the Mississippi Delta to the Rio Grande at first glance have a documentary diffuseness, like work from the 1970s whose subject, repeatedly, was “America.” But the tension of a refugee is always there, and the photographs are never simply transparent. She wants to know her subjects as well as locate them. For without acknowledging them in this way, no matter where they might reside politically, there can never be resolution, security, or hope.