An-My Lê is a Vietnamese American photographer and professor at Bard College. She is a 2012
MacArthur Foundation Fellow and has received the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), the
National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Award (2007), and the
Tiffany Comfort Foundation Fellowship (2010). Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, and now lives and works in New York. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. She studied biology at
Stanford University, receiving her BA in 1981 and her MA in 1985. She attended
Yale School of Art, receiving her MFA in 1993.
Her book
Small Wars was published in 2005. In November 2014, her second book,
Events Ashore, was published by
Aperture. Events Ashore depicts a 9-year exploration of the US Navy working throughout the world. The project began when the artist was invited to photograph US naval ships preparing for deployment to Iraq, the first in a series of visits to battleships, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, and scientific missions in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Source: Wikipedia
In 1994 An-My Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time and began making a series of photographs informed by her own memories and by the stories and perceptions of her family. Since then her photographs and films have addressed the impact of war both environmentally and culturally. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures capture the disjunction between the natural landscape and the intervention of soldiers and machines meant for destruction.
Projects include
Viêt Nam (1994–98), in which Lê's memories of a war-torn countryside are reconciled with the contemporary landscape;
Small Wars (1999–2002), in which Lê photographed and participated in Vietnam War reenactments in Virginia; and
29 Palms (2003–04) in which United States Marines preparing for deployment playact scenarios in a virtual Middle East in the California desert.
Source: Guggenheim
