An-My Lê

The Silent General

Born in Saigon, An-My Lê and her family fled Vietnam in 1975 and eventually settled in the United States. Since she began photographing in the early 1990s, Lê has explored the impact of violent conflict on American culture and psyche and on the natural landscape. Across numerous bodies of work, she has examined America’s preoccupation with military action by focusing her camera on staged expressions of power through such subjects as Vietnam War reenactors, army training exercises, and naval war games.

Beginning in 2015, galvanized by current events and America’s divisive reckoning with its past, Lê undertook what she describes as a “re-imagined American road trip.” Taking inspiration from Specimen Days, Walt Whitman’s 1882 autobiographical account of another fractious time in American history, the Civil War and its aftermath, she has traveled across the United States to photograph locations where political and social disputes unfold. She adopted The Silent General, Whitman’s name for Union General Ulysses S. Grant, as her title and has grouped the pictures into discrete “fragments” in homage to the poet’s literary structure. The initial photographs in the series addressed the removal of Confederate monuments in the South, and vestiges of the Civil War remain a recurring theme.

For her commission, Lê created a new “fragment” that focuses on the current social unrest that emerged in Washington, DC, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. “It often seems that there are two Americas, left and right, looking at the same place from radically different and irreconcilable perspectives,” she explained. Her matter-of-fact approach borders on journalistic, yet rigorously composed images lyrically describe what she calls a “theater of the real.” Centered on the protests, press events, and other daily activities held near the White House, with national monuments and federal buildings as the backdrop, Lê takes a wide view to offer ample context for a scene. She carefully assembles telling details that reveal how America’s challenges of the past shape and rhyme with the heated debates of the present.

View all works in the commission.