For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. First published in 2005, Small Wars brings together three interconnected series. In Viêt Nam, Lê returns to the country she left in her teens and attempts to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape; in Small Wars, she engages a small community of Vietnam War reenactors; and in 29 Palms, she documents the preparations of marines in the California desert as they undergo training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work. The twentieth anniversary edition of Small Wars is a lush reissue of the original, with five additional images and a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later.
