| "Theater of war" refers to the geopolitical area that
any given war actively encompasses. But the term can be thought of
in other ways, too. Battles are staged: plotted and choreographed.
Troops are deployed in ensemble-style units, like corps de ballet.
All of this requires rehearsal, and rehearsal for war is the subject
of An-My Le's photographs.
For a previous series, Ms. Le, who was born in Saigon in 1960 and came to the United States as a political refugee in 1975, immersed herself in America's re-enactment culture, taking pictures of enthusiasts in Virginia and North Carolina who simulated battles from the Vietnam War. Her new series was shot at the Marine Corps Air Ground Control Center in California, a desert outpost where marines train for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. As seen in Ms. Le's large-format prints, the bleak terrain has a John Fordish grandeur. And the marines act out the equivalent of cowboy-and-Indian roles: some play Americans; others play Iraqis. Abandoned houses from a real town once on the site are used as props: they are like a backlot Hollywood ghost town, with a few details added to establish a wartime Iraqi ambience: there's graffiti in fake Arabic, and two scrawled phrases in English, one dissing Osama bin Laden, the other dissing George W. Bush. Ms. Le is a superb technician, and her pictures are dramatic and gorgeous, the way combat photography often is. They are also apt documents of a war that, some people argue, is based on a fiction and, at least as originally scripted, staged for the press. HOLLAND COTTER |
