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| An-My Lê Left Vietnam as a Child. She Returned as a Photographer. | An-My Lê Left Vietnam as a Child. She Returned as a Photographer. |
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| The initial photographs of the Hamas-Israeli war arrived, as if out of nowhere, like a kick to the chest. How could this mutual slaughter be happening, so suddenly, and on this scale? I thought of the American poet Walt Whitman’s stuttering shocked reaction to America’s Civil War. “The dead, the dead, the dead,” he keened, “Our dead — South or North, ours all, all, all, all.” | The initial photographs of the Hamas-Israeli war arrived, as if out of nowhere, like a kick to the chest. How could this mutual slaughter be happening, so suddenly, and on this scale? I thought of the American poet Walt Whitman’s stuttering shocked reaction to America’s Civil War. “The dead, the dead, the dead,” he keened, “Our dead — South or North, ours all, all, all, all.” |
| Another, later American poet and political activist, Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), might have been less surprised by the present catastrophe and the images it’s generating. “It is the history of the idea of war that is beneath our other histories,“ she coolly wrote in the late 1940s, early in the bitter long Cold War that followed World War II. War, with its guarantee of violence, she was saying, is always in progress somewhere, maybe everywhere, in one of three predictable stages: preparation, detonation, cleanup. | Another, later American poet and political activist, Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), might have been less surprised by the present catastrophe and the images it’s generating. “It is the history of the idea of war that is beneath our other histories,“ she coolly wrote in the late 1940s, early in the bitter long Cold War that followed World War II. War, with its guarantee of violence, she was saying, is always in progress somewhere, maybe everywhere, in one of three predictable stages: preparation, detonation, cleanup. |
| This long view of war as a perpetual reality, always nascent, always realized, is the major subject of the work of the American-Vietnamese photographer An-My Lê, whose lucid New York survey opens at the Museum of Modern Art this Sunday. And one of her specific points of reference is the American War in Vietnam, which she directly experienced. | This long view of war as a perpetual reality, always nascent, always realized, is the major subject of the work of the American-Vietnamese photographer An-My Lê, whose lucid New York survey opens at the Museum of Modern Art this Sunday. And one of her specific points of reference is the American War in Vietnam, which she directly experienced. |