An-My Lê takes large-scale black-and-white photographs with a 5x7 view camera to achieve extraordinarily detailed images that capture the way the world is “drawn.” Black and white also destabilizes a sense of the photograph’s historical moment. “The world seen in black and white,” she says, “feels one step removed from its reality, so it see4ms fitting as a way to conjure up memory or to blur fact and fiction. “

Lê was born in Saigon but has lived since she was a child in France and America. She returned to Vietnam in the mid-1990s to make her first major series. The “Viêt Nam” (1994-98) photographs were her attempts to document a place known to her as much through memory as through the kind of representations available to her growing up abroad. Returning to the States, Lê became more interested in American representations of Vietnam and specifically in Vietnam battle recreation societies. The photographs of “Small wars” (1999-2002) were made with a group of men in Virginia during their long-weekend re-enactments. While some images depict the mock fights from a distance, others are taken from odd, low angles, as if the photographer was hiding from the figures seen in the image. And this was the case: to ensure the authenticity of the scenario, Lê was only permitted to photograph if she played a part in the recreation. The photographs represent somewhat ridiculous machismo activities without ridicule, and also show how the “fighters” forge a real bond with the landscape during their weekends. Though the precondition of their trip is a violent game, they nonetheless inhabit the woods with an unusual level of appreciation.

Lê’s initial response to the Iraq War was to travel there as an embedded photographer, but eventually she produced a series of images of the US marines training for Iraq in the Californian desert. In these we see tanks moving across a plain, soldiers entering a mocked-up Iraqi town, night maneuvers, fake arrests and military lessons. Fiction and reality collide: though the “Iraq” the marines create is a complete fantasy (the shacks are adorned with graffiti as the marines imagine it will look, all squiggly Arabic script and ”Kill Bush” slogans), these are real documents of their fantasy. As such they are perhaps the most authentic representations of the contemporary crisis, for it was the Iraq of America’s imagination that pushed the troops to war. The series has as complex a relationship to the history of photography as it does to current events. Some images recall Roger Fenton’s Crimean War landscapes, but there is a persistent absence of the sense of imminent danger that we would find in Robert Capa’s work. Lê’s subject also torques a mode of recent art photography, the mise-en-scène or set-up image associated so strongly with Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. Where such artists elaborately construct fake scenes to photograph, Lê found her faked scenes readymade. Perhaps the most compelling quality of the series is its ability to forge a profound critique of American aggression without criticizing the subjects of its images. The marines are as much victims of the war of fact and fiction as they are its perpetrators. And the extraordinary beauty of the photographs continually mitigates against any danger of them being taken for two-dimensional political statements.