An-My Lê: "29 Palms"
“I just wanted to approach the idea of war in a more complicated and more challenging way” says artist An-My Lê, whose photographic series and film 29 Palms (2003–04) explore the training exercises and desert landscape near Joshua Tree National Park as a staging ground for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Credits
Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: An-My Lê. Video: © 2011, Art21, Inc. All rights reserved.
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An-My Lê was born in 1960 in Saigon, Vietnam, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BAS and an MS from Stanford University in 1981 and 1985, and an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Documenting former sites of battle, military training exercises, and Vietnam War reenactments, An My Lê’s photography considers how conflict lingers in the landscape and how media shapes our perception of it.
An-My Lê
War and Aesthetics
Artist An-My Lê discusses her process of aestheticizing war, and the thinking behind her choice of black and white photography.
Vietnam
Artist An-My Lê discusses her childhood, and how her background has influenced her worldview and her work.
“You would think that I should make something that’s outwardly anti-war because I’ve seen so much devastation and because I’ve lived through war. But I was not so interested in that as I was in raising all these issues. The issue of landscape in war, and how you have to move all that equipment, and the army, and the whole battalion, how do you move that across? And suddenly, a hill is much more than a hill.”
An-My Lê