
An-My Le
Events Ashore
Aperture (Publisher)
Published on 13. October 2014
Book
Hardback
168 pages
978-1-59711-299-4 (ISBN)
Description
An-My Le's first publication, Small Wars, brought together three bodies of black-and-white work (Vietnam, Small Wars, and 29 Palms), offering a trilogy of tautly rendered examinations of the spectacle of war, memory, and landscape. With Events Ashore, Le continues her exploration of the American military, a pursuit both personal and civic. With this body of work, however, Le emerges as a master colorist, employing the large-format color negative to powerful effect to capture the sometimes surreal, often surprisingly beautiful vistas of the military at work, with an emphasis on descriptive and compositional precision and subtlety of palette. Events Ashore began when the artist was invited to photograph U.S. naval ships preparing for deployment to Iraq, the first in a series of visits to battleships, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, and scientific missions in the Arctic and Antarctic. As Le explains, these trips allowed her to study close at hand the military's non-combat activities, becoming "a launching point for an examination of the U.S. military on the global stage across oceans and borders as a symbol of conflict, an echo of the age of exploration, and an unlikely (and unsung) force in the unfolding environmental crisis. . . . This work is as much about my perspective, and personal history as a political refugee from Vietnam, as it is about the vast geopolitical forces and conflicts that shape these landscapes."
Reviews / Votes
The speed, action and sense of peril common to news photographs of conflict are largely absent from her pictures. instead, readers get the impression of a massive force lumbering deliberatley across the globe, from Australia to Panama, Antarctica, Greenland and elsewhere.In Le's beautiful portraits, officers and other personnel appear placid, stoic, almost bored-another day at the office, keeping watch on a multi-billion-dollar aircraft carrier as it ambles through the Arabian Gulf.--Conor Risch"PDN" (12/01/2014)More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Illustrated in colour throughout
Dimensions
Height: 340 mm
Width: 274 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
2044 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-59711-299-4 (9781597112994)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
An-My Le 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; Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris; and the Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, among others. Geoff Dyer is the author of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, "among other novels, and several nonfiction books, including "Out of Sheer Rage". He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 for "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition". He lives in Los Angeles.
Photographs by