Née à Hô Chi Minh-Ville en 1960, An-My Lê a fui le Vietnam avec sa famille à la fin de la guerre, en 1975, et trouvé asile aux Etats-Unis comme réfugiée politique. Titulaire d'un master en biologie de l'Université de Stanford (1985), elle a également obtenu un master en beaux-arts à l'Université de Yale (1993). Son travail a fait l'objet d'expositions individuelles au Museum of Contemporary Photography de Chicago, au musée d'art moderne de San Francisco (SFMOMA) ainsi qu'à la Henry Art Gallery de Seattle.
Ses œuvres sont en outre présentes dans les collections de musées tels que le Metropolitan Museum, le MoMA, le Whitney Museum of American Art et le Guggeinheim Museum de New York, le SFMOMA et le Hessel Museum of Art. Parallèlement à son travail de photographe, An-My Lê enseigne depuis 1998 la photographie au Bard College (Annandale-one-Hudson, Etat de New York). Ses photographies et ses films explorent les répercussions et les représentations de la guerre. En noir et blanc ou en couleur, ses clichés captent la tension produite par le contraste entre un site dans son état naturel et la transformation brutale que subit celui-ci en devenant le théâtre d’hostilités.
Auteur de plusieurs projets photographiques, elle a notamment réalisé Viêt Nam (1994-98), série dans laquelle elle rapproche les souvenirs qu'elle a conservés d'un pays déchiré par la guerre et le paysage dans sa réalité présente, et Small Wars (1999-2002), photographies prises lors des reconstitutions de la guerre du Vietnam auxquelles elle a participé en Caroline du Sud. La série 29 Palms (2003-04) montre des marines américains se préparant à une simulation de déploiement dans le désert de Californie transformé, pour l'exercice, en une zone d'opérations au Moyen-Orient.
An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. Lê received BAS and MS degrees in biology from Stanford University (1981, 1985) and an MFA from Yale University (1993). Her photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures frame a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields. Projects include "Viêt Nam" (1994–98), in which Lê’s memories of a war-torn countryside are reconciled with the contemporary landscape; "Small Wars" (1999–2002), in which Lê photographed and participated in Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina; and "29 Palms" (2003–04), in which United States Marines preparing for deployment play-act scenarios in a virtual Middle East in the California desert. Suspended between the formal traditions of documentary and staged photography, Lê’s work explores the disjunction between wars as historical events and the ubiquitous representation of war in contemporary entertainment, politics, and collective consciousness. She has received many awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996). She has had major exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2006); International Center of Photography Triennial (2006); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City (2002); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997). Lê lives and works in New York.
More adventurous in scope than other comparable compendiums, Photo Art is a vast critical survey of contemporary conceptual-oriented photography. It particularly addresses the work of artists emerging in Western and Eastern Europe--many of whom will be new to American audiences--and presents critical contexts for their work in accompanying essays. Gathering more than 120 image-makers from around the globe, this luscious compendium reads like an international art fair between covers, with the work of artists to watch now and in the future, from established figures to representatives of the newest generation. Among the artists featured here are Roy Arden, the Atlas Group, Seung Woo Back, Richard Billingham, Gerard Byrne, Claude Closky, Natalie Czech, Tacita Dean, Luc Delahaye, Ruud van Empel, J.H. Engstrom, Charles Freger,...
"Conflict, Time, Photography" presents the many facets of the artistic portrayal of armed conflicts using the medium of photography. Artists such as Don McCullin, Pierre-Antony-Thouret, Simon Norfolk, Stephen Shore, Michael Schmidt and Taryn Simon have depicted acts of war and their legacy, in photographs taken in the mo-ment of the action, as well as days, months, years, and even decades after the event. This major group exhibition has no intention of serving as a ‘history of war photography’, however. It instead explores the various possibilities and strategies that artists and photographers have adopted to try to come to terms with violent conflict, in the hope of overcoming it. On show are some 200 works ranging from a period of just over 150 years in the history of photography, from 1855 to 201...