Talk and Book Signing with An-My Le and Richard Woodward October 20, 2005

Photographer An-My L? and critic Richard B. Woodward discuss L??s first monograph, Small Wars, which includes an insightful essay by Woodward. Born in Saigon in 1960, L? came to the U.S. as a political refugee at age fifteen. Divided into three series, Small Wars begins with a body of work that L? made during return visits to Vietnam from 1994 to 1997, in which she re-created her childhood memories of rural Vietnam. For her second series, L? photographed a community of Vietnam War re-enactors who re-created battles scenes in the woods of Virginia. For the last series, L? traveled to Southern California to document real soldiers training in Twentynine Palms, a desert like terrain similar to that of Afghanistan and Iraq, in preparation to invade a country on the other side of the world. The cumulative effect??each series reflecting and building on the other?? brilliantly elucidate the complicated nature of the aesthetics and spectacle of war.