An-my Lê
Small Wars
June 30 - November 1, 2002
An-my Lê was born in 1960 in Vietnam and came to
live in the United Sates as a political refugee in 1975. In 1999, Lê began working with a
group of Vietnam War re-enactors in South Carolina, who, like the better-known Civil War
re-enactors, restage battles, training, and daily life of soldiers—both Viet Cong and
American GIs. For two summers, with war veterans, their children, and military personnel
who "missed out" on a combat tour to Vietnam, Lê participated in and
photographed battles of the Vietnam War restaged on her adopted American soil.
Taken outdoors with a large-format camera, the richly
detailed 30" x 40" black-and-white images possess the serenity and clarity of
mid-19th-century American landscape photography. The work therefore
participates in both documentary and staged veins within contemporary photography, in an
achievement both rigorously aesthetic and conceptual. Soldiers at rest give themselves up
to portraiture, while figures captured in mid-battle compositions recognizable from
classic war photojournalism somehow possess the qualities of a dream.
An-my Lê received an MFA in Photography at Yale University
in 1993. Recent exhibitions include Photographs from the Permanent Collection,
Metropolitan Museum of Art (2001); Documents, Perceptions, and Perspectives, Rhode
Island College, Providence (2000); Re-imagining Vietnam, Fotofest, Houston (1998); Selections
from the Permanent Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
(1997-98); New Photograhy 13, Museum of Modern Art, New York, (1997-98); and Picturing
Communities, Houston Center for Photography (1997).
This exhibition was organized by P.S.1 Associate Curators
Larissa Harris and Daniel Marzona.
For more information, please contact press@ps1.org |
