Becoming an Artist
An-My Lê
When An-My Lê describes her transition from biology student to artist, she claims that she really didn’t know what she should do. “As any responsible child of an immigrant, I knew I should do something that would be more practical. My brothers were engineers and went to business school, and I thought engineering would be too dry; so I thought, why not biology and become a doctor?” Lê recalls, while printing a photograph from the series Trap Rock (2006) in her New York studio.
Within her photography and films, Lê examines the ramifications and representations of war, reflecting on U.S. foreign policy’s role in her own life as both a perpetrator of violence and as a savior.
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An-My Lê was born in 1960 in Saigon, Vietnam, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BAS and an MS from Stanford University in 1981 and 1985, and an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Documenting former sites of battle, military training exercises, and Vietnam War reenactments, An My Lê’s photography considers how conflict lingers in the landscape and how media shapes our perception of it.
