By BLAKE GOPNIK
Washington Post Staff Writer
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 NEW YORK
The most interesting show of the Chelsea season also has the strangest premise behind it. Photographer An-My Le, who came to this country as a refugee from Vietnam in 1975, recently managed to get permission to photograph a "virtual Iraq" established for troop training at a Marine base in the California desert. Lugging a huge, tripod-bound view camera, she visited a corner of our Wild West now done up to simulate our wild corner of the Middle East. Le's show at Murray Guy gallery, an underrated space that's a touch off the beaten track, shows us the result.

A suite of abandoned prefab buildings that were once housing for U.S. officers is now smeared with such slogans as "Good Saddam," "Go Home GI" and "Kill Bush."(Imagine the Pentagon work order for that particular paint job.) Le's preternaturally crisp black-and-white photos show a bunch of troops-in-training taking turns playing good guys, bad guys and guys somewhere in between.

One photograph presents four young Americans costumed in scruffy civvies, wearing the homemade armbands of the Iraqi police. Complete with dangling Kalashnikovs, these amateur actors do a fine job of conveying lassitude and a desultory performance of duty. You have to hope the role's a stretch for them.

Another photo shows a platoon of uniformed Marines as they take down urban "insurgents" wearing track suits. An unarmed bystander -- presumably an officer -- watches the scene. He's in fatigues and is wearing a gas mask, but his hands are in his pockets and he leans against one of the houses with Cary Grant nonchalance.

A third image shows a distant desert landscape, with tiny GIs checking out a street of scattered houses surrounded by sand. Look more closely at the shot, however, and it turns out that the houses are just props; they're the kind of free-standing facades you'd find on the MGM back lot.

That sense of fantasy pervades Le's show. The most painful, important reality of our day comes at us in a "practice version" that's so stagy, it's almost surreal. The pictures are as crisply illusionistic as anyone could want. But the technical perfection of their realism implies a maximum of heavy camera gear, which means there's nothing candid about these shots. They may feel like open windows onto the action they show, but they couldn't have come about without tight planning and cooperation between the static photographer and her moving subjects. The show's news release compares Le's work to posed shots taken by the equipment-laden photographers of the Civil War. But their battlefield images involved manipulating things to show warfare after the fact. Le catches military action before it's even happened.
These pictures imply a nation that's been Hollywoodized from top to bottom. Set in the landscape of our Manifest Destiny, Le's photos suggest a world where the imagined and the real might sometimes be confused. They make me wonder if American self-image might sometimes trump realpolitik.

At Murray Guy gallery through Oct. 16. Call 212-463-7372 or visit www.murrayguy.com.