An-My Lê

An-my Lê’s image appears to document soldiers deployed in the Middle East, but instead records staged maneuvers at the Marine training camp in California for which her series “29 Palms” is titled. The harshness of the intense light and mountainous desert terrain and the documentary style of her black-and-white prints all sustain the fiction that these soldiers are in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than California. Shooting with a large format camera from a height and remove that captures the vast theater of activity in the landscape, she describes the scene with remarkable yet cool and detached detail. Photographing staged combat, Lê ultimately
stages a dialogue about a distant war with huge consequences for American culture and lives.