From Our Archives: An-My Lê: The Intimacy of Distance

An-My Lê, Manning the Rail, USS Tortuga, Java Sea, 2010.

This interview was featured in issue no. 24 - Identity

ANDREA BLANCH: How did your art career begin?

An-My Lê: It was actually really late. As a child of immigrants and refugees, I didn’t know what to do, and we were all told that we should prepare for a career that was safe and stable. I didn’t know what to do, so I studied biology thinking that I would go to medical school. I was not accepted to medical school the first time I applied. Then, someone said, “get a master’s degree in biology, do research, publish papers, and apply again.” So I did all those things. And, in the last semester of my master’s degree in biology, I was allowed to take a non-science, and I wanted to take drawing. But it filled up first... and that’s how I got into photography. And I did get into medical school. So it became a kind of big juncture in my life where I had to decide to not go to medical school and do something that I had no idea what it meant. I didn’t see myself becoming a photographer or becoming an artist. I don’t think I quite realized what it was until I decided to go back to graduate school to study photography at Yale. I knew that I wanted to become an arts photographer.

ANDREA: Do you think that being a photographer or, generally, being an artist helped you with finding your identity?

An-My: I think my big revelation was returning to Vietnam early on to work on a project—and I think I was looking for a home—and realizing that actually my home was the art and that I was an artist before I was anything—American, Vietnamese, or Vietnamese American… but I think after finishing Events Ashore, it sort of gave me the confidence in exploring America. I think Events Ashore was about America, but I think it was also about my identity as a Vietnamese refugee and that experience with the military. In general, it’s really about being an American, or Vietnamese American, or whatever it is. That series carries quite a bit of optimism. I think that’s what a lot of my work does: there’s a push and pull. That’s the way I feel about the military as well. There are incredibly positive things as much as they made a lot of mistakes… it’s incredibly bureaucratic. I think that the portraits of the young women I made at the military are incredibly powerful. You know, I always loved Robert Frank’s The Americans, and Stephen Shore’s works or Joel Sternfeld, but I could never really identify with it. I think, in my head, I loved the works, and I believe in great photography, and I teach it. But I think, in my heart, I could never really connect to it until now.

ANDREA: How so? Aesthetically? The experience?

An-My: The experience of the American road trip.

Sniper II, 1999-2002.

ANDREA: Your work was partly influenced by the increased discriminatory and racist events happening in the United States in 2015. Today, with all the racial injustice that has been occurring in the country, your work seems more relevant than ever. How can you place your work within the current social and political climate, and do you see any direction in which it will evolve?

An-My: I have to thank Christopher Lew at the Whitney for having invited me to be part of the Whitney Biennial for 2017. In 2015, I started photographing on a Civil War film set, as well as photographing the monuments that were being contested. So, starting in 2016, I showed him some of the work, and he invited me to be in the show. I think the Whitney is about what artists are making right now. They’re thinking about the zeitgeist and thinking about what’s going on. Feeling that sense of community with other artists gave a sense of urgency and a sense of importance to what I was making. So perhaps I was on track and I had looked at the right things, but I didn’t have the kind of urgency and the kind of push that came after I received the invitation. It shifted everything into the right gear, and I think I’ve maintained that momentum ever since. It helped me in this process of thinking about how my work could be engaging with the moment but also thinking historically. I think it pushed me to use all of my photographic skills. Everything I had learnt up until then: photographing actions, being in the moment, and also not being able to capture it all because the view camera just doesn’t do that. So you look for something that’s secondary that could be just as powerful. It seemed that everything I had done up until now prepared me for art in general—emotionally, technically, psychologically… I felt confident in who I was. So it’s been great. I mean, it’s been a crazy and upsetting time, but I feel very prepared for the moment.

ANDREA: How did you come into using landscape photography to express yourself rather than portrait photography?

An-My: I’ve always loved Eugène Atget and the sense of photographing something that is disappearing… I tried to do landscapes in graduate school, but I was looking at the wrong things and kind of abandoned it very quickly. It somehow made sense to me to return to Vietnam. That sense of scale—I don’t think I knew what I was going into, but photographing landscapes just came to me very quickly then.

Read the rest of this interview in issue no. 24 - Identity

Migrant Workers Harvesting Asparagus, Mendota, California, 2019.