FIRES ON THE PLAIN
By Andrew Maerkle
US Naval Hospital Ship Comfort, Haiti (2010), from the series “Events Ashore.”
A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant” in 2012, An-My Lê is one of the most remarkable photographers working today. Known for carrying out intensive projects that develop over the course of several years at a time, she uses a large-format camera to capture the dynamic forces – whether natural, man-made or social – that surround us and complicate the world. Lê was recently in Japan to give an artist talk in conjunction with the thematic exhibition “Time of others,” held April 11 to June 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and currently touring to the National Museum of Art, Osaka. ART iT met with her in Tokyo to discuss her practice in greater detail, from addressing the challenges of working as an embedded photographer with the US military, for the series “Events Ashore” (2005-12), to questioning the role the Vietnam War, which she lived through as a child and young adult in Saigon before emigrating with her family to the US in 1975, has had in shaping her outlook.
“Time of others” continues through September 23 at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, before traveling to Singapore and Brisbane.
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ART iT: As you may know, the Abe administration’s aggressive push to enable the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to engage in collective self-defense – a policy that is being promoted under the rubric of “proactive pacifism” – is a major issue in Japan right now. Many people feel that democracy in Japan itself is at stake, as the constitution unequivocally renounces the use of military force to resolve international conflicts. The argument for “collective self-defense” is rooted in attacks on the legitimacy of the post-war constitution, which critics say was forced upon Japan by the US, and resentment about Japan’s perceived continuing dependency on the US. Perversely, the re-militarization of Japan plays into current American geopolitical strategy.
This backdrop creates a highly charged atmosphere for viewing the works from your “Events Ashore” (2005-12) series here. How do you see your works in the context of representations of the military in the US?
AML: Well, as much as the work may be charged here, its reception also varies depending on where it is seen in the US. To step back a bit, as a photographer, I’m interested in looking at and representing the real world, and interpreting it in ways that allow me to learn from it and enlighten the issues I am trying to understand. I feel entirely comfortable using photographs with simple titles and explanatory texts. And I feel comfortable with the fact that some people may interpret a photograph differently from others. My photographs are visually complicated and carry complex messages because of the way I pack the information into the frame and structure the picture. People need to spend time with the work in order to piece together all the information. But of course the reading is subjective. I like that. I like that it could be contradictory, that it could be full of surprises, that it could be confusing. I see a fragile construct between the objective and subjective.
Ultimately, the picture is there to incite someone to think about the issues at stake, rather than say explicitly how I myself feel about the American military. Some of my work could be understood as being supportive of the military. You could look at some pictures and think: wow, those young Americans are so heroic! Or you could see in the same image a reflection of American imperialism: look at the American guy standing there, trying to teach the locals how to do it the American way! There are so many possible interpretations. Sometimes the US military comes in and does help people. For example, after the earthquake in Haiti, the military was able to accomplish what no one else could. It was there with supplies in a matter of hours. But there’s a fine line between coming to help and invading, and it has to do with physical and economic presence and the ways in which Americans occupy the land. So the work is about those tensions.
I think it goes back to my own conflicted perceptions of the US military and what it did to Vietnam. At the end of the war, it was the Americans who could help us escape from the approach of communism. Everyone tried to scale the walls of the American Embassy, not the French Embassy. So it’s about all those conflicted things.
ART iT: Are you familiar with the Japanese photographers who have photographed US military installations in Japan and their surrounding environs, like Shomei Tomatsu or Akihide Tamura? In this case, the pictures are outwardly critical of the US military as an occupying force, but also betray a kind of fascination, if not outright admiration, for the American culture and lifestyle.
AML: They are fascinating photographers. There is a darkness in their works – an atmosphere that is engulfing. A complex response to the presence of the US military makes for complicated, challenging work that is ultimately very satisfying.
ART iT: You often describe yourself as a landscape photographer, but as your practice has evolved, you have also incorporated more portraits as well. One reading of “Events Ashore” is that it humanizes the military – especially in your portraits of young servicewomen – but there is another dynamic in the work that also effaces the people, through the use of scale or the way they are juxtaposed against the landscape.
AML: Yes. I started including portraits in the color work. The black-and-white work previous to that was about a sense of scale, the sense that when you show the context behind a military operation, no matter how powerful it may be, there is always something larger and more uncontrollable, and for me that’s the weather, or the landscape – all those things. I’m not religious, but I do believe there is some other, greater force that comes into play. It’s a way to not only talk about the military – or any human endeavor, really – but also to talk about it in context. That’s what I did in “29 Palms,” when I photographed the marines training to go to Iraq. I came to understand a lot about life in the military through conversations with the marines. At that point, I had never quite understood why someone would join the military. I thought people join because they want to fight, because they want to shoot guns, because they want to combat evil forces. But I realized that some join for economic reasons: just to get a job. Some want to travel. Some see it as a way to get out of difficult circumstances: some were orphans who grew up in tough foster homes and felt the military gave them an opportunity to escape. So I gradually came to understand the human component, the redemptive aspect of this complicated equation.
I’m not a bleeding-heart humanist, but when I started the color project I felt that I should allude to some of those personal stories. I didn’t want them to deflect from the work as a whole, but I wanted it to be a facet of the project. I had portraits of both men and women, but I think the female portraits were much more resolved, because I was interested in how, working in what is a very masculine world, the women had to be competent the way men are, and yet still try to retain their individualities.
I actually see my portraits as a kind of landscape as well, because portraiture is also about scale, about an individual, about his or her personal life within a structure – in this case, the military machine, a global organization – and so I use the word landscape in a broad way to talk about scale. I see it as a system that I can freely use to explore issues of power, gender, race and economics.
When I was first discovering photography, there were discussions about Ansel Adams in relationship to landscape. He was committed to preservation by showing nature in its full beauty and grandeur, but I became more interested in Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore and all the photographers whose practices centered on man-altered landscapes. There is a complicated dynamic between architecture, nature, culture and the wilderness that I connect to in their work. Landscape is ultimately about history, and the history of civilizations.
ART iT: Looking at your previous projects, it seems there’s been a natural progression from “Viet Nam” (1994-98) to “Small Wars” (1999-2002) to “29 Palms” (2003-04) to “Events Ashore.” Do you see it that way?
AML: I do, but it was never planned. I have to say the color work has been the trickiest for me. With “Events Ashore,” I chose color because everything was happening in real time, and the color palette could describe things I couldn’t do in black-and-white. I was out at sea, and there would be a gray ship against the blue sea, but a black-and-white print would only give gradations of gray. I felt it wasn’t descriptive enough for this project, so I switched to color. The topic is already so linked to current events, and the use of color made the pictures so close to real life that it can be difficult for some people to understand that it’s not photojournalism, it’s not documentary work, and it’s actually art, in the sense that it’s expressive. It comes from a different place. With “Small Wars,” you could say, oh, it’s a reenactment, so it’s talking about something that isn’t real, or with “29 Palms,” you could say, it’s training, and it resembles a Hollywood backlot. That easily draws out the conceptual underpinning that doesn’t exist in obvious ways in the new work.
ART iT: In the US it seems difficult for people to talk about the military. There’s a lot of self-censorship involved. For example, when the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, there were admonitions from the media and among the people not to criticize the invasions, because to do so might demoralize the troops.
AML: Yes, it’s all very simplified – the yellow ribbon, “support the troops.” They come up with all these digestible ideas. We have to support the troops, because look at what happened with Vietnam: the veterans came home and we treated them badly. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look critically at why we were there and what it means and how it’s affecting the troops, their families and communities. So I was interested in how things are not what they seem, and I wanted to look beyond the façade. The military incites really polarized reactions. In New York and on the East Coast, where people are more liberal, the viewer may look at my work in a particular way, whereas more conservative audiences in other parts of the country will have different interpretations.
An-My Lê: Fires on the Plain