The landscape photographer surveying the ‘liminal spaces’ of war — and peace

An-My Le doesn’t identify as a war photographer. Though her work deals largely with themes of human conflict, it’s not the actual combat she’s preoccupied with.

An-My Lê doesn’t identify as a war photographer. Though her body of work across the last three decades deals largely with themes of human conflict, it’s not the act of combat itself she is most preoccupied with. For Lê, who came to the United States from Vietnam as a teenage refugee in 1975, and is now based in New York, it’s rather the ambiguous “liminal spaces” of military existence that hold her focus, offering a psychological vantage point beyond the machinery — and mythology — of war. Take Lê’s “29 Palms (2003-4),” a black-and-white series shot at a Mojave Desert camp where a battalion of US Marines were conducting training ahead of deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Through Lê’s lens, the arid California landscape evokes the nationalism of both American expansionism as well as Hollywood’s reenactments of wars abroad. Her images capture the rising smoke of artillery fire and bolts of lights descending from air bombs during war games, barracks scrawled in faux Arabic to mimic scenes in the field, and young soldiers role-playing — some American heroes, others enemy insurgents. “It doesn’t have the same explosive, devastating quality of real combat,” Lê said of the series. “It’s much quieter. It provides a space that is a little more meditative… You can think about the reasons we are going to war — and about the consequences.” Some 20 years since the completion of “29 Palms,” Lê is currently exhibiting her first-ever New York museum survey, “Between Two Rivers,” at the Museum of Modern Art. The show comprises other earlier works like Lê’s study of a Hudson River quarry, “Trap Rock (2006-7),” along with her ongoing series “Silent General” and a new cyclorama — a series of connected panels arranged into a 360-degree view — titled “Fourteen Views (2023),” which was created for the exhibit. Drawing parallels between the Mekong and Mississippi, “Between Two Rivers” presents Lê’s photography in the context of the world’s water ways — what Lê describes as “fluvial journeys” that represent the ceaseless, circular flow of human history. “It’s the notion of multiple rivers, multiple sources of culture and information, things changing, things never staying still… It’s about borders and delineation,” Lê explained in an interview with CNN, adding that, to her, rivers also take on a personal meaning. “The river is the foundational source of many of Vietnam’s myths and origin stories, and so it just seemed really fitting to me.”