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for An-My Lê
An-My Lê
American, born Vietnam, 1960
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
An-My Lê (born 1960) received her BAS and MS degrees from Stanford University and an MFA from Yale University. She is currently a professor of photography at Bard College and is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2012, she became a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her work has been widely shown and collected internationally, including at The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; and the Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, among others.
[Geoff Dyer]
Born in Saigon in 1960, her family came to the US in 1975. Always interested in how photography captures “reality,” after her MFA from Yale, she made several return trips to Vietnam in the 1990s to see if she could take pictures that would match her memory of the place she left as a teenager. She once explained that memory is often made up of sensations, smells, and tastes rather than clear pictures. Not content to just capture Vietnam, she went on to use photography as a tool to question the machinery of war. She started by photographing Vietnam war reenactments in West Virginia. And was told that she had to participate in order to be allowed to photographs the players. She was given the part of a Viet Cong girl. That she agreed, rather uncomfortably, shows how far she is willing to go to challenge the perceptions of war in photography. The results were astounding. They captured soldiers in army fatigues “looking” as if they were in the Mekong Delta when, upon closer look, it becomes clear they are sitting in the pine forests of the Appalachians. [http://diacritics.org/2012/11/congratulations-to-photographic-artist-an-my-le-for-winning-a-macarthur-genius-award/]
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