There’s a stillness at the heart of An-My Lê’s photographs, no matter what turmoil they record. The hubbub of cities, the pantomimed passions of street protests, the frenzy of a neighbourhood soccer game — all freeze theatrically, as in a diorama. Her work, now in a viscerally satisfying exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, transforms everyday reality into a sequence of set pieces that seem archetypal even when they’re just pictures of people hanging out on a street corner or clouds scudding across the sky. The action orbits around a central hush, as if the world were never too busy to pause its rounds for her camera.
Lê’s first New York survey covers three decades of her peripatetic career. Born in Vietnam in 1960, she fled with her family to California in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. They alighted in Sacramento, and two years later she enrolled at Stanford. While working towards a masters in biology, she took a photography class, a choice that set her down on the rocky road of art.
Her timing was perfect: in 1994, the year after she graduated from Yale’s masters of fine art programme, President Bill Clinton lifted the US trade embargo on Vietnam. Lê travelled to her native country for the first time in 19 years. The show opens with what she calls a “self-portrait” but is actually a Vietnamese girl roughly the same age as the photographer was when she left. We see her in profile, her face unlined but sombre, already marked by sorrow.
This wistful, tender photo stands out in a body of work that generally plays down feeling in favour of fact. It reminds me of Lewis Hine’s angry yet resoundingly humane portraits of child workers, which bared the wrongs inflicted on America’s youngest citizens. Lê does something similar, balancing dignity and compassion.
In another photo of the same girl — not in the exhibition but reproduced in the catalogue — we get a more inclusive view of her life: dirty, ill-fitting clothes, weathered hands, bare feet treading tall, prickly grass.
It’s less a study of an individual than a report on existence constricted by poverty and labour, closer to Walker Evans’s sober, forensic portraits of Alabama sharecroppers in their tumbledown homes, pinned in place by circumstances beyond their control. Like Evans, Lê favours a large-format camera with a long exposure, which allows her to pack the view with detail and produce images of static monumentality.
Her Vietnam homecoming left her disoriented: “I felt I didn’t recognise anything in Vietnam.” She alludes to that feeling obliquely in a street scene taken in Ho Chi Minh City. A knot of men in white shirts, dark pants, and sandals (plus one woman and one child) shield their eyes to gaze up at a solar eclipse. Uncle Ho himself looks benevolently down on his people from a banner at their backs. The past has become two-dimensional, the future is blinding.
Rattled by the country’s rapid urban change, she ventured to the Mekong Delta to shoot deep-focus views that have an ageless, idyllic quality. A farming family poses in the middle distance, haloed by a circle of palm trees and a pen full of ducks. Another household, shaded by lush vegetation, dwells by waters so still and glossy they could be a sheet of marble.
When she returned to Vietnam again in 2011, having exchanged black and white for colour, Lê seemed less startled and more analytical. Her Delta series juxtaposes the experiences of teenage girls near the Mekong and the Mississippi. Even though 9,000 miles and vastly different cultures separate the adolescents of Ho Chi Minh City and New Orleans, we watch both groups on parallel tracks, slipping into adult gravity.
War threads its way through her work, but indirectly, in pictures of exercises, games, civil-war statues and fake soldiers. “Small Wars” (1999-2002) features Vietnam war re-enactors in Virginia and North Carolina. Most of the participants had never been in combat but enjoyed the fantasy. In exchange for permission to photograph these events, Lê agreed to play the role of a South Vietnamese Viet Cong fighter.
The make-believe gives her photos of a downed fighter jet shrouded in mist, or pretend GIs crouching in the foliage, a movie-like look of authenticity. “My pictures stand in complete opposition to combat photography,” she has said. “We are dealing with parallel subjects, but the outcome — the meaning — is completely different.” Her work doesn’t read as anti-war messaging, either, but as a comment on conflict as spectacle.
Even the real military concocts fictional battles. She shot the series 29 Palms in 2003-04 at a base in California where Marines trained for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The desert and the smoke are genuine; the danger isn’t. These photos lack crackle, maybe because Lê positioned herself too far from the action to reproduce much excitement or emotional depth.
Since 2015, disparate projects scattered around the US have cohered into Silent General, a panoramic portrait of a country riven by fear, political chasms and incompatible visions of the future. “I’ve been making this series to relieve anxiety about what’s been going on in the past few years — division, chaos, racial tensions, all stuff I would not have felt so deeply five years ago,” she has said. “What makes America America? The wilderness, the vastness, our sense of history.”
You sense those tremors most powerfully in her pictures of teens, who are never wild or dissipated, just numbly rehearsing for their next chapter. They flop on the ground after a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington, DC, mill around during a gun control rally in New York, enjoy a Fourth of July picnic in New Orleans in ways she can massage into formal compositions.
In the Fourth of July scene, the arrangement of young bodies on the riverbank soon gels into a mash-up of Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” and Seurat’s “Île de la Grande Jatte”. The Impressionists, too, chronicled moments of serenity amid shudders of change. Lê has found her great subject in that ongoing subterranean struggle, the tension between the mundane and the seismic that Baudelaire called “the heroism of modern life”.
To March 16, moma.org
