AnMy Le: Small Wars Twentieth Anniversary Edition

<p><b>The twentieth anniversary edition of An-My Lê’s acclaimed first book<i> Small Wars</i>, reissued with five new images and an afterword by Ocean Vuong.</b></p><p><span> </span>For the past three decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling. </p><p><span> </span>First published in 2005, <i>Small Wars</i> brings together three interconnected series. In <i>Viêt Nam</i>, Lê returns to the country she left in her teens and attempts to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape; in <i>Small Wars</i>, she engages a small community of Vietnam War reenactors; and in <i>29 Palms</i>, she documents the preparations of marines in the California desert as they undergo training for conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taken together, this trilogy brilliantly presents a complexly layered exploration of the issues surrounding landscape, memory, and the representation of violence and war. </p><p><span> </span>With great precision and clarity, Lê is able to evoke the work of nineteenth-century landscapes as well as that of the New Topographics—but by weaving in her own personal narrative of refuge and return, she pushes beyond both to produce a uniquely revelatory body of work. The twentieth anniversary edition of <i>Small Wars</i> is a lush reissue of the original, with five additional images and a new afterword by Ocean Vuong, who discusses how these bodies of work resonate twenty years later.</p>