An-My Lê: Pt III

III.


Damage Control Training, USS Nashville, Senegal (2009), from the series “Events Ashore.”

ART iT: Looking back over your career, do you feel that each project has its own contained aspect to it, or is there some element over which you feel you’ve developed a real mastery from consistently photographing similar subject material?

AML: There are certain things I did very well and still do very well. I think capturing human activities splayed in the landscape is one of my strengths. With “Events Ashore,” I moved to a medium distance. In the photograph of the firefighting drill on the exhibition poster, the group of trainees is shown fairly close and there is not as much of a sense of scale. That’s a new type of picture for me. Or photographing two people together. It’s not necessarily what I’m best at, but I felt it was necessary. These images complete the picture, and the topic is so huge and important that having the spectacular landscape with unusual events unfolding in it was not going to do the job on its own. I needed to layer that perspective with close-up portraits and photographs from a middle distance.

ART iT: One of the striking elements of “29 Palms” is your use of negative space and empty space.

AML: Well, it was also shot in a desert – there is an emptiness there that I needed to embrace and give meaning to. More specifically, the challenge was about finding a way to suggest both the grandeur of the landscape and the detailed activity of the Marines in the foreground. Because if you’re too far away you apprehend the landscape but you can’t decode the activity, and if you’re too close, you decipher the soldiers but you lose the vastness of the landscape. So there’s a perfect distance, and it took me time to figure it out.
And then there was also the issue of figuring out the right gestures to depict. I think gestures are very important. A gesture that operates as something like a punctum is not so interesting for me, because once there’s a punctum, there’s nowhere else to go. There’s another kind of gesture that suggests both before and after, and extends and sustains the movement. That suspension interests me. Or it could be a slightly awkward gesture that makes you feel, oh, I’ve never seen it done quite that way before, whereas in the run-of-the-mill pictures you might see a gesture which is exactly how you imagine throwing a bomb to be, so it describes that experience precisely, but not in a surprising way.
But I think you always want to try doing something you don’t do well or haven’t done before, and after “29 Palms,” I felt a need to balance the distance with some kind of emotional investment. Working in color is also different. I think I have a great ability for bringing out the drawing of things in a black-and-white image. It’s about carving out negative and positive space. But it doesn’t really come through in the same way in a color photograph. It’s about something else.

ART iT: Is narrative something you consciously address in your photos?

AML: I don’t know whether it’s narrative, but the pictures are always about suggesting something that’s not in the frame. The more you can suggest beyond the frame, the more interesting it is for me.
For example, there is the photograph from “Events Ashore” of the Buddhist nun and the sailor sitting together in the patient waiting room on a US Naval Hospital ship in Vietnam. The picture describes what it describes, but beyond the frame you can start thinking about the idea of Buddhism and the structure of religion versus the structure of the military. The nun and the sailor both wear uniforms, they both have shaved heads, and yet they are at polar opposites. You could be engrossed by what’s described in the picture, but it also pushes you to think about things beyond the frame. Here again, the fragile construct between the objective and subjective comes into play.

ART iT: How about your early series “Viet Nam” – looking back now, what’s your assessment of the work?

AML: I think for me that trip was cathartic, because I never thought I would be able to return to Vietnam. The French-Vietnamese started going back in the mid-1980s and early ’90s, but it was never safe for Vietnamese-Americans until the normalization of relations with the US in the mid-1990s. I suddenly had this amazing opportunity to go back and reconnect with a childhood and culture I could never fully experience because of the war.
But for me it was not about coming to terms with the war. I was more interested in connecting with the North, which I didn’t know. My mother is from the North, which is the traditional home of Vietnamese culture, and I wanted to know it and understand the landscape. When we were living in Saigon, it was always safer inside the city, and if we went anywhere, we would always come back by nightfall. So I really wanted to learn about the landscape and its role in Vietnamese culture. I would say there is a little nostalgia and sadness in these pictures, but it was about giving voice to those feelings, and I completely ignored the topic of war.
Toward the end I started making pictures that were ambiguous, with kites and smoke suggesting planes and destruction. I also went to the DMZ, but it was only after I came back to the US at the end of the project that I felt an urgency to deal with the war, and then I went and found the reenactors.
As I spent more time working in Vietnam, I also realized I was more of an American than a Vietnamese, and it was important to recognize how comfortable I felt being Vietnamese-American, or rather that I was an artist before I was anything else.

ART iT: In terms of how you composed the images or chose the subject matter, do you feel there was a jump from “Viet Nam” to “Small Wars,” or from “Viet Nam” to “Events Ashore”?

AMA: The landscape has always been very important. Again, I admire the entire generation of photographers connected to the New Topographics – but how do I literally describe human endeavors in a landscape, and not just hint at it? And that was the question I always carried with me. I think I slowly began to make sense of that when I went to Vietnam.
Actually, up to that point I had not been a landscape photographer. I was trained as a biologist, not as an artist, and then before I went to graduate school at Yale, I worked for a guild of craftsmen in France, photographing interiors, and I got very good at that. Then at Yale the faculty said, you can’t work indoors all the time, you have to experiment. So I switched to landscape, but the landscape in New Haven is pretty predictable. I had some terrible critiques and kind of gave up. I thought, maybe I’ll make my own still-lifes, so I started collecting turn-of-the-century pictures from Vietnam, as well as chemistry hardware that reminded me of my background in biology, and incorporated them into these scenes that were very arty. It was with those experiences that I went to Vietnam, but as soon as I arrived I knew that it was the landscape that spoke to me, and I quickly figured out things that I hadn’t been able to figure out before.

ART iT: Were you already using a large-format camera then?

AML: Yes. I was using 4×5 to photograph the interiors in France, and then I switched to 5×7 in grad school. But I had never really used it the way I did in Vietnam, which is, I would get on a motorcycle, drive around, and whenever I saw something interesting, I would jump off and take the picture. The pictures were composed, but also felt on the go. I wanted to make the camera experience the same thing I was experiencing. It was about knowing where to place the camera to replicate what I had experienced physically, emotionally.

ART iT: How many exposures would you make each time?

AML: Once I figured out where to stand, I would make a few extra exposures in case I messed up. But I generally knew exactly where I wanted to stand. I wouldn’t stand some place and then take one step over and make another exposure. That was very rare. I would walk back and forth and decide exactly where the camera should be, and then I might do a different exposure from on top of a building or from a different angle.

ART iT: How does that process work when you’re making photos of the military, with moving helicopters or tanks or other vehicles?

AML: It’s difficult. I think it started with “Small Wars.” The first time I went to the reenactments, I thought it would be ridiculous to run after those guys with a huge view camera, so I brought a handheld camera instead. I was trying to reconsider my tools. Later, I made some prints and was disappointed with the quality – the sense of space and dimension and the richness and physicality just weren’t there. I thought, how do I make it work with the 5×7? And then I remembered Timothy O’Sullivan and also the war photographers from the 19th century, and decided to tone down the action and spontaneity and try to work with setting up.
It was a learning experience. It was hard, because the reenactments were held for just three days each month in the summer, and it was tough to wait an entire month before going back. It took practice. Figuring out the right landscape: if what they’re doing is interesting, but the landscape’s not right, then when they stop, you make them move to the right landscape. So it was about becoming more of a director. That was not easy for me. Telling them what to do. Stopping things, changing things. Because, like you said, you’re embedded, and you don’t want to disrupt things too much. I always ask myself whether I’ve pushed it far enough – sometimes they say no, or something doesn’t happen – have I gone as far as I could? Sometimes I feel I went all the way and sometimes I walk away feeling I didn’t.

ART iT: One of the other artists in this exhibition is the photographer Vo Anh Khang, who was working for the Viet Cong during the war and still lives in Vietnam. Do you know his work?

AML: Yes, I do know his pictures, and I really love them. There’s something a little staged about them, and you realize that these pictures were probably made for propaganda. I love that quality. There’s a bit of a disjunction that makes you question the nature of the work. It actually rides the line between the photographic document and art.

ART iT: Would you say that Vietnam has somehow been an undercurrent throughout your whole practice?

AML: Maybe not Vietnam as such, but certainly the idea of political and military conflict, because it has affected my entire life. I don’t think of myself as a victim, but I remember as a young kid thinking, why was I born in Vietnam, and why am I dealing with all this? Even in the US, in the 1970s and ’80s, the idea of Vietnam was still very raw, and when the issue came up people would look at me or feel awkward. There were all these movies coming out, like Welcome Home (1989), in which Kris Kristoffersen plays a vet who returns to the US after being missing in action for 17 years, and I remember going to see it with some college friends and having this intense discussion afterwards. I had my own point of view, of course, which was very different from that of everyone else, and they looked at me and said, oh, for you it’s a personal matter, or that I’m being prickly, which made me angry. The war was so horrific and destructive, and affected not just the Vietnamese, but many Americans as well, and even now I can still feel the repercussions in the US, so there is always a sense of being somehow implicated in the whole thing, and not being able to dissociate from it.
The idea of the soldier being vilified is also difficult for me. I didn’t heroicize the GIs, who did their share of awful things, but toward the end of the war, when things looked really dire, I think everyone in the South still hoped the Americans would come and save the day. So the idea of the US military is very complicated for me.
I felt relieved once I was actually able to explore the military in a complex way and show that there are some interesting soldiers – men and women with personality, and integrity – within this crazy mess, and one does not negate the other. The idea of giving up your power of choice to join the military, where someone else makes all the decisions for you, is something I only understood once I started working closely with the Marines. It is about trust. It doesn’t mean they don’t have integrity or opinions. But it is a mess. I think that’s what I have tried to show as well. And my job is not to solve the mess or steer people towards some kind of resolution. I think that’s why we’re artists. We pick up a mess and keep it messy.

Pt I | II

An-My Lê: Fires on the Plain

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