Vietnam-born photographer honored as US ‘genius’
Wednesday, October 03, 2012, 21:00 GMT+7
Amercian-Vietnamese photographer An-My Le has just won the $0.5mln 2012 MacArthur Fellowship 2012, also known as “Genius Grants”, one of most valuable awards honoring varied creative works in the US.
This year’s award is given to 23 people from various fields including science, literature, music, fine arts, education, and film.
An-My Le, 52, received this award in recognition of her photographs, which "approach the subjects of war and landscape from new perspectives to create images that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and are rich with layers of meaning,” the judges say.
The winner will receive a cash prize of US$500,000, paid as quarterly installments over five years to pursue their creative activities in the absence of any specific obligations.
The annual MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically 20 to 40 United States citizens or residents, of any age and working in any field, who "show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work".
People are nominated anonymously by a body of nominators who submit recommendations to a small selection committee of about a dozen people, also anonymous.
Before An-My Le, two other Americans with Vietnamese origin won the award in 1987 and 2007, respectively.
An-My Lê, who is currently living and working in New York, was born in Saigon (former name of Ho Chi Minh City) in 1960. In 1975, An-My Le and her family settled in the US.
She received BAS and MS degrees in biology from Stanford University (1981, 1985) and an MFA from Yale University (1993).
Her photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures frame a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields.
Among her well-known photography projects are "Viêt Nam" (1994–98), in which Lê’s memories of a war-torn countryside are reconciled with the contemporary landscape; "Small Wars" (1999–2002), and "29 Palms" (2003–04), in which United States Marines preparing for deployment play-act scenarios in a virtual Middle East in the California desert.
Her work explores the disjunction between wars as historical events and the ubiquitous representation of war in contemporary entertainment, politics, and collective consciousness.
During her career, she has received many awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996).
In 2006 alone, she had three major exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2006); and International Center of Photography Triennial (2006).
Piror to the year, she had her photographs featured at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City in 2002 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997.
When asked about An-My Lê, French-Vietnamese war photographer Vo Trung Dung commented:
War photographs by An-My are very different from those by traditional photojournalists like me. We do not see war scenes, machine gunners or suffering through her photographs. Her works lay ahead of you, like the series "29 Palms" in North California.
This type of visual material can be found at the boundary between documentary photography and fiction. This is not a "first". Other photographers have already explored this documentary: Frenchman Yan Morvan on the Lebanese conflict, Jo Ratclife on Angola, Donovan Wylie on Afghanistan ... An-My’s photos do not really show the war but they provoke reflection on the war ... They analyze the impact of the representation of war, and at the same time they denounce the "spectacle" of war published in traditional media. She eases the conflict and leaves the audience time to look through the use of a complicated and large format.
Personally, I am not a "fan" of this kind of photographic work. But her works have made me think about war, its absurdity and violence. Is that good?
