Photographer An-My Lê: “A good picture is one that is surprising.” | Louisiana Channel

An-My Lê is one of the most interesting photographers today. We visited her in New York and spoke about her world – both personal and within photography.

“My life story really shaped what kind of photographer I became. I think, as an outsider, you feel that you don't really belong here. You are forced to observe. And so, I think photography gave me the license to continue observing and asking questions and being quiet on the side.”

As a teenager in 1975, Lê fled Vietnam with her family, eventually settling in the United States as a refugee. Her work often addresses the impact of war on culture and the environment. Lê says her "main goal is to try to photograph landscapes in such a way that it suggests a universal history, a personal history, a history of culture."

“I wanted to photograph this exercise that trained the Marines on how to deal with an ambush. There is this really tight close-up of the Marines after the training. I was so moved because they were just young men and women the age of my students or my neighbors' children, so full of life, so full of idealism, and they were being shipped off to war. So, I think it was very, very painful too. It was heartbreaking to see how vulnerable they were.”

“A good picture is one that is surprising. Nothing has not been photographed, so a good picture is something that may be familiar to me, but it's described in a way I've never seen before.”

An-My Lê (b.1960) is an internationally renowned photographer primarily based in New York. She is currently the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, New York. Lê has received numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.

Lê’s work has been exhibited widely, including in the Whitney Biennial and Taipei Biennial, as well as the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern, among others. In 2020, Lê had a major exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which traveled to the Amon Carter Museum and the Milwaukee Art Museum, for which a comprehensive catalog was published by Aperture. In 2024, Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai going sông/Entre deux rivières, a 30-year survey of her career, including her forays into film, textiles, and installation, was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

An-My Lê was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in her studio in Brooklyn, New York, in June 2024.

Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024

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