Atmospheric opacities: An-My Lê’s fog(s) of war

Abstract

Abstract

Over several decades, the Vietnamese artist and photographer An-My Lê (b.1960) has used fog to explore the entanglement of war, landscape and collective memory across global contexts. Moving from the Vietnamese jungle to the Southern California desert, Lê’s work uses different forms of atmospheric opacity – such as mist, dust and smoke – to interrogate how the deferred past and anticipatory future of armed conflict shapes the visible present. This article examines how this ‘fog of war’ is mobilised in Lê’s photography. Although Lê uses forms of environmental occlusion that range from exploding ordinance to tropical rainfall, this article argues that fog is used to challenge the supposed immediacy of traditional war photography. Rather than a ‘window’ onto the suffering of others, Lê uses fog to stage a contemplative encounter with the cultural context of armed conflict that is simultaneously critical and affective.

Fog has many guises in the context of war. It appears as smoke sent skyward by explosions, as sand kicked up by landing helicopters and as dust that floats in the wake of marching armies. It appears as foliage that obscures sightlines or as the pitting of landscapes carved by high-yield bombs. Fog also emerges in more metaphorical casts: as an absence of information on the battlefield, a strategic blindness of the enemy’s location within the so-called ‘theatre of war’. In the critical text On War (1832), the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz used fog to capture this peculiar duality, which has remained central to strategic thinking up until the present day.¹ ‘War’, he claimed, ‘is the realm of uncertainty’ in which a multitude of relevant factors are always ‘wrapped in a fog’.² For Clausewitz, this fog is itself a powerful enemy that conceals hostile soldiers, jams guns and confounds marching orders. It is a physical and epistemological challenge that must be dissolved, pierced or cut through if victory is to be achieved.

The Vietnamese artist and photographer An-My Lê (b.1960) approaches the fog of war differently. Rather than framing it as an enemy to be combated, she enlists dust, sand, mist and smoke to confound clear representations of conflict. Known for addressing practices of military re-enactment and rehearsal, Lê mobilises the elemental opacity of fog to question how the visualisation of past and future wars shapes the present. In Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City FIG. 1, for example, fog provides a means of staging the visual entanglement of present and past. Although the photograph shows a crowd gathered in the Vietnamese capital in the late twentieth century, swirling kites and clouds of smoke recall the American bombing campaign that wrecked the city decades before. While this history is by no means empirically present within the image, Lê’s careful framing of a busy strip of ground beneath a yawning sky references pervasive images of ‘death from above’ FIG. 2. For a viewer steeped in a particular image culture, the photograph reveals an insistent collective imaginary. As Lê said of her Viêtnam series (1998), in which this image appears, ‘even though war itself was not the focus of these photographs, it was present because of its conspicuous absence’.³

What role does fog play in these images, and how might it relate to Lê’s broader concern with the representation of war and conflict? In published interviews, Lê often contrasts her work with traditional war photography, which gains rhetorical force by staging an immediate proximity to violence. ‘Chaos, the horrific violence of the moment, and the obvious risk incurred by the photographer’, she claims, ‘all play into producing an image with a brutal if not blinding immediacy’.⁴ In contrast to such photographers as Ron Haeberle (b.1941) FIG. 3 and Tyler Hicks (b.1969), who offered distant audiences a window onto the battlefield wasteland, Lê’s images approach war from a place of remove, querying the visual legacy of war through the disjointed temporality of re-enactment and rehearsal. At stake here is not the documentation of war’s empirical reality, with all its terror and bloodshed, but a more diffuse object: what the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen terms ‘the war in memory’, the process by which a given conflict becomes recognisable to global publics.⁵ In the context of the Vietnam War, Nguyen argues that pervasive images of torched homes, massed helicopters and suffering people have hegemonically shaped the conflict’s historical identity. He argues that by privileging the perspective of the aggressors, representations in the media, such as those in Life magazine and Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), have staged the coherence of an imaginary physiognomy: a ‘face’ that has moulded practices of memory up to the present day.⁶ By shaping the coherence of this ‘face’, this type of media have resolved the fog that surrounds historical conflict into a clear image.

Drawing on Nguyen’s concept of the face, the present author argues that Lê mobilises fog to interrogate practices of enactment that manifest the visual identity of war. Whether she captures Vietnam War re-enactors or military war games, Lê presents them as material phantasmagoria: corporeal images that are projected against a broader landscape of fog.⁷ At once physical and conceptual, fog operates as an elemental screen and as an epistemic occlusion, indicating those moments in which the imaginary identity of war surfaces through practices of simulation and restaging. By obscuring or even dissolving content in different forms of atmospheric opacity, Lê’s work positions the fog of war as a pervasive social condition, one that consistently shapes the ways in which war is both anticipated and remembered.

Lê’s series Small Wars (1999–2002) vividly demonstrates this dynamic. Shot during a series of Vietnam War re-enactments staged in the pine forests of South Carolina, this series sought to understand what Lê terms ‘the Vietnam of the mind’.⁸ Composed, she states, of fragments of war films and combat photojournalism as well as personal memories, this imaginary Vietnam stands in indeterminate dialogue with the past, present and future of the actual place. Projected into a foreign landscape, this diffuse ‘face’ becomes palpably visible. In Ambush I FIG. 4, for example, a group of re-enactors are seen running through dense undergrowth. The blurring of the figures and hanging cloud of smoke confirm the tension that the title implies. One imagines that at the second Lê’s shutter clicked, the group was surprised by an unseen enemy. The smoke indicates the immediate threat of gunfire and grenades, and although no soldiers have fallen, one senses that they could be killed at any moment. At the same time, however, one is aware that this scene is a farce. No Viet Cong are present in the Carolina wilderness; the image shows only the re-enactors’ idea of what their tactics might have been.

Ultimately, this scene stages a particular conception of the Vietnamese landscape: the American experience of hostile ‘terrain’ in which United States forces operated at a distinct disadvantage. As Lê notes, American voices – from military planners to members of the popular media – were obsessed with the danger posed by the Vietnamese ecology.⁹ Rather than a vibrant ecosystem and cultural touchstone for the Vietnamese people, the dense rainforests were, in the words of the New York Times correspondent C.L. Sulzberger, ‘fetid mahogany forests tenanted by game and cut by sluggish rivers’, beyond which ‘slashes on the mountainsides show where guerrillas grow their rice’.¹⁰ After the war’s conclusion, films such as Apocalypse Now FIG. 5 cemented this perspective in popular culture, painting the Vietnamese landscape as a figurative ‘heart of darkness’ that was anathema to civilised life. Running through leaves and smoke, the soldiers in Ambush I provide an active demonstration of this imagined Vietnam. The photographic frame invites us to see the scene itself as an image, a corporeal manifestation of what the Vietnam War is for a group of individuals who experience war through the mediation of collective memory. It is a demonstration of the war’s contemporary ‘face’.

Other images in Small Wars extend this investigation to a wider cultural context. In Rescue FIG. 6, which shows re-enactors defending the crash site of a downed fighter jet, the smoke that emanates from a source out of frame signals the deliberately cinematic character of this image. On either side, soldiers scan the surrounding brush through their gun sights, aiming at potential enemies, while in the cockpit a body hangs limp, as though shattered by the crash. Everything is perfectly staged, except for the incongruous foliage that intrudes from the edges of the frame. All of the kit is accurate, down to the Vietnam-era ‘leaf pattern’ fatigues, but the pine trees make the scene distinctly uncanny.

Although the elaborate set and live smoke recall war films, for example Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) as well as Apocalypse Now, the pines provide a counterpoint to familiar practices of cinematic simulation. As Lê argues in her discussion of Small Wars, we are often remarkably unsuspicious of the ‘painstaking “reenactments”’ that film studios regularly stage.¹¹ Mediated by film, she suggests, these simulations seem more compelling and less overtly strange. When witnessed in the raw, however, their link to more pervasive forms of media, such as film, often go unrecognised. A second image from Small Wars makes Lê’s engagement with this theme overtly clear. Titled Explosion FIG. 7, it shows the detonation of a small munition in the middle of a clearing, with bright arcs trailing from a group of boxes and cans. The bright flash illuminates the surrounding trees while reducing the background to an opaque haze. The foreground is extremely sharp, with individual leaves and the texture of bark visible, but the hazy background negates any discernible context. This careful staging transforms the scene into a diorama, a war film miniature formed from real life. Even the detonation, with its Roman-candle arcs, can be read as a toy firework – a bit of industrial light and magic taken from the Hollywood arsenal. Here, reality is made to coincide with its image. The ‘real’ explosion is positioned as an evocative special effect.

Lê pushes this theme further in her series 29 Palms (2004–05). Set at the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command in Twentynine Palms, California, the temporality shifts from past to future, interrogating training drills that in effect pre-enact images of war. In photographs such as Mortar Impact FIG. 8, which shows puffs of smoke spiralling upwards in front of a looming mountain ridge, one sees the residue of military war games framed against an overexposed sky. Although one can imagine how destructive these bombs would be in a combat situation, the explosions appear small against the scale of the mountains. As in Small Wars, the absence of actual targets transforms the mortar fire from a deadly weapon into a harmless spectacle. Here, however, the dusty target range stands in for the object of an imminent invasion: Iraq, where the unit that Lê photographed would soon be deployed.

Similarly to Small Wars, the ambiguous temporality of the 29 Palms photographs plays a significant role in their ultimate impact. Although the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had only just begun when Lê visited Twentynine Palms in 2003, her photographs anticipated the now iconic imagery that circulated front pages and television screens throughout nearly two decades of war. For example, if one places Mechanized Assault FIG. 9 alongside those taken during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the resemblance is very striking. In Lê’s image, which shows a unit of tanks and Humvees deployed in the desert outside of Twentynine Palms, military power stands in ambiguous relation with the drama of the ambient topography. When compared with the photograph taken in northern Iraq by Sergeant Eric Schwartz in 2009 FIG. 10, there is an eerie verisimilitude, with armoured vehicles placed against a sublime background of looming dunes.¹² Lê, it seems, was able to inhabit the gaze through which American eyes seized distant territory.¹³ Such formal resonance confirms Joan Kee’s claim that ‘war is waged as intensely through taking and making images as it is through ground warfare and airborne attacks’.¹⁴

29 Palms queries the distinction between exercises and real war, rendering their relationship fundamentally ambiguous. As in Small Wars, these photographs shift one’s focus away from the immediate brutality of the battlefield, interrogating the ways in which physical violence is mediated by a broader culture of images.¹⁵ This dynamic is demonstrated with particular clarity in Lê’s Security and Stabilization Operations, three photographs in the 29 Palms series documenting drills that anticipate the counter-insurgency operations regularly performed in Iraq. In one of these works FIG. 11 the material rendering of a future enemy is made clear: a physical manifestation of his imagined face. The image focuses on three figures in the foreground – two soldiers who have either shot a ‘militant’ or wrestled them to the ground – while graffiti on the surrounding buildings gestures towards the broader motivations of these ‘pre-enactors’. On the left, a partly obscured message enlists a sympathetic viewer to ‘KILL BUSH!’ and a second message demands that the foreign GIs ‘GO AWAY!’.

Although these bizarre hieroglyphics index the war’s ideological justification – the idea that the incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan constituted a ‘crusade’ against a culture of aggression and terror – their presence at Twentynine Palms poses deeper questions about the people who carried out the conflict. How did these soldiers feel playing the part of combatants that they would soon be expected to kill? Did the physical experience of being wrestled to the ground provoke doubt about the brutality of the supposedly friendly side? On the other hand, the spray paint demonstrates the hostility that the soldiers were expected to confront. Even though they had not yet met their enemy, his image was formed long before they stepped onto the field. Before the battle began, the enemy already had a distinctive face.

This shift from recollection to anticipation, however, changes the stakes of this photographic operation. Instead of the commemoration of a past war, 29 Palms shows the implicit justification for a future conflict. Using the California desert as a practical analogue for the deserts of central Asia, the United States military was able to play out a fantasy of what the ‘War on Terror’ would be. This operation is far from unprecedented. By the time the United States Marines began using the desert outside Twentynine Palms as a target range, in 1953, film studios had long employed the variability of the Californian landscape as a substitute for the wider world. As the film and media studies scholar J.D. Connor has noted, ‘movie ranches’ run by studios such as Disney, Paramount and RKO all used California’s ecological diversity to ‘shoot “on location”’ without incurring substantial extra costs’.¹⁶ From the studios’ perspective, Southern California brought the entire world within driving distance of the backlot; a director could shoot anywhere without stepping on a boat or plane.

Lê’s photographs help viewers to see the military exercises as a similarly spectacular pursuit. When missiles streak through the night, they leave brilliant trails that shine in sand thrown aloft by explosions FIG. 12. Kicked up by ordnance, hazy clouds of dust transform the sky into a reflective screen. The night is sliced by emblazoned lines, the darkness illuminated by the momentary flashes of exploding bombs. Although these activities anticipate actual combat operations, Lê wants the viewer to understand that they are not merely practical. On this military film set, fog reveals the official strategy of ‘shock and awe’ as a fundamentally aesthetic agenda.¹⁷

This focus on spectacle, however, belies Lê’s deeper interest in the human dimension of conflict. In her interviews, she declines to assimilate enlisted men and women to the directives issued by their superiors, refusing to cloak them in the fog that often obscures military operations from the public. As she stated of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a 2005 interview with the writer Hilton Als:

I was extremely distressed the day the war began in March 2003. Strangely enough, my heart did not go out immediately to the Iraqi civilians, but to our troops. I first thought of the scope and impact of war on them and their extended families. I am not categorically against war, but I feel the decision makers and policy makers have no idea how devastating the effects of war can be.¹⁸

The idea that leaders justify war through the opacity of battlefield operations is interrogated by the film-maker Errol Morris in his documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) and James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang in their book of the same name. In the documentary, which juxtaposes archival footage from the Vietnam War with an interview with Robert McNamara, who served as the United States Secretary of Defense during the early stages of the war, one sees how obscurity enabled the devastation of soldiers and civilians on both sides. As President Lyndon B. Johnson makes clear in audio recordings heard in the film, the lead-up to war with North Vietnam was characterised by a large degree of uncertainty, where even the reality of reported attacks was called into question. On 4th August 1964, for instance, when a possible engagement between North Vietnamese patrol boats and the destroyer USS Maddox raised the spectre of open war, Johnson was unable concretely to identify whether the enemy leadership had indeed ordered an attack. When further reports from the ship remained ambiguous, Johnson ordered a retaliatory strike on North Vietnamese port and oil facilities, opening a war that would eventually claim millions of lives over more than a decade of fighting.¹⁹

In his commentary on the events, which Morris splices into the archival recordings, McNamara describes how the fog of war impacted his and Johnson’s decision-making. ‘We were wrong’, he states, ‘but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action. And it carried such heavy costs’. Despite anxieties around communist aggression and ‘domino theory’ having dissipated with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the fear of unknown threats to American interests only intensified after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Felicity D. Scott notes, pervasive fears of overpopulation, pandemic and generalised social unrest shifted attention away from ‘hot wars’ between great powers towards diffuse insurgent conflicts. Rather than traditional military engagements, guerilla wars and pacification operations consumed the attention of military planners, encouraging the development of ‘an emergent apparatus of territorial management and security’ that spread around the globe.²⁰ Such an environment positions the entire planet as a potential battlefield, a strategic glacis in which overwhelming force can be projected anywhere at any time.²¹ It is this paradigm that forms the subject of Events Ashore (2009–10), the series that followed 29 Palms, in which Lê reconfigures the relationship she had previously established between ‘fog’ and ‘face’.

Whereas Lê’s previous projects engaged with the visual legacy of particular conflicts, Events Ashore situates the human face within a planetary apparatus of counter-insurgency. Featuring scenes from the Persian Gulf to the South Pole, the series shows the incredible variety of peace-keeping activities that the United States military pursues outside of direct combat missions. In Ship Divers, USS New Hampshire, Arctic Seas FIG. 13 a nuclear submarine surfaces in an unidentified stretch of the Arctic Ocean, its monolithic form surrounded by marine frogmen who stand guard on the cracked ice. Manning the Rail, USS Tortuga, Java Sea FIG. 14 shows sailors looking out from the deck of the titular ship, their eyes fixed on an immense fleet of container ships that stretch out into the Java Sea. Rendered in vibrant colour, these images gesture towards an immense military infrastructure that elides coherent representation. What one sees, ultimately, is the tip of an inscrutable iceberg, a small portion of a global apparatus that only momentarily offers itself to apprehension.

While such images capture the technological sublime of military force projection, Lê’s ultimate interest rests with the people that man this diffuse strategic machine. Although she had photographed individual subjects as early as her Viêtnam series, the portraits included in Events Ashore show a new investment in the human face. Aircraft Carrier Arresting Gear Mechanic, USS Ronald Reagan, North Arabian Gulf  FIG. 15, for example, shows an unnamed woman in a green aircraft catapult-crew jersey, her gaze turned pensively downwards, away from the camera. Seaman on Bridge Rotation, USS Tortuga, South China Sea FIG. 16 shows a sailor leaning on the ship deck, his arm twisted to display a prominent tattoo that reads ‘Married To The Sea’. These photographs stage the tension palpable to anyone that puts on a uniform.

Although military service demands discipline and conformity – requirements that Lê foregrounds by titling her portraits after the jobs that her subjects perform – individuality is never truly suppressed. Indeed, it can become even more visible by contrast, as with the seaman, whose distinctive belt buckle stands out against the camouflage pattern of his standard-issue fatigues. By linking this more detailed perspective to the grand seascapes of Ship Divers and Manning the Rail, these photographs pose a more intimate question: who are the people who allow this military apparatus to function? If a fog obscures the strategic agenda that guides the operations that Lê shows, then her portraits introduce a different level of visibility, one which asks us to consider who might be thrown into action when forces are readied for war.

But what of those wars that are not past or future, but present? Does fog play a role in Lê’s more recent turn towards what she calls ‘the war at home’? Whereas an image such as Fragment I: Battle of Corinth, Film Set (Free State of Jones), Bush, Louisiana, courtesy of STX films  FIG. 17 from the Silent General series (2015–ongoing) clearly resonates with Small Wars, it also treads new ground. Unlike Small Wars, the drama of this photograph lies in the direct presentation of artifice. Rather than indicating the spectacular core of re-enactment, this scene invites us to question the ways in which memory is presently made. Shot in colour, it shows a film crew both staging and reproducing a historical image. Smoke and dust fly dramatically, while crew members with cameras and boom microphones lean in to capture this Civil War battle. Although the contrast between the crew and the regiment foregrounds a paradoxical sense of irreality, it is the choice to produce the image in colour that makes the most significant impact. Rendered dull under the cloudy sky, the muted browns, blues, greens and reds possess an eerie resemblance to colourised Civil War photographs.²² Here, Lê plays with the way that this type of imagery makes the past feel strangely present. Displaced from the familiar paradigm of black and white, one can see how the experience of temporal distance is, as Peter Geimer argues, ‘stained’ by the absence of colour.²³ By framing colourisation amid the re-enacted scene, Lê stresses the proximity of an imagined past that is, in actuality, a product of the present.

The subject of this image, however, is also important. The film Free State of Jones, produced during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, stars Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight, a dissident army surgeon who led a rebellion against Confederate forces. Reviews of the film consistently noted that it possessed a timely political agenda.²⁴ By dramatising anti-Confederate resistance, as well the vicissitudes of post-war reconstruction, it inveigled against the tide of American ethno-nationalism that boiled over in 2016. This reading is enriched by an accompanying website created by the director Gary Ross to explain the historical facts that the film dramatises. Although the site contains many assertions of the contemporary importance of this history, a paragraph from Ross’s prologue is the strongest contribution to this discussion. It reads:

In the modern world, where we get so much of our information from popular culture, the filmmaker is under even more pressure. Today, people read less and watch more, and whether we like it or not, academic history is often overwhelmed by popular history. Les Mis actually becomes the French Revolution, Homeland is somehow the ‘real’ war on terror, and Lincoln is inevitably remembered as he was in Lincoln.²⁵

Ross’s assertion that historical memory is formatted by popular imagery resonates deeply with Lê’s approach to photography. At a time in which the image of the historical past forms a primary site of political struggle, we cannot attend too closely to the ways that memory is presently made. Lê’s image of a monument to the Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard engages this terrain precisely FIG. 18. Silhouetted by a gossamer banner strung between two embellished columns, the general is conspicuously flattened and transformed into an abstract figure. Although we know that the statue is in the round, Lê’s careful staging of the banner shows it as an insistent image of the Confederate past. The hazy effect of this screen, which the present author reads analogously to Lê’s more elemental fogs, stages the political stakes of the statue. Riding in a landscape of silhouetted trees, Beauregard is the image of the Confederacy triumphant, a phantasmatic projection of the kind often mobilised by today’s far right. Lê confirms this in a photograph from the following year FIG. 19, which shows a group of Beauregard’s descendants posing in front of the statue while numerous cameras look on. This image was captured at a press conference staged by the Monumental Task Committee, a self-described ‘heritage’ organisation that contested the proposed removal of the statue.²⁶ If the statue is ‘heritage’, this ensemble tells us, then its meaning is rooted less in the historical past than in the political debates of the present. For exactly this reason the statue was removed from its pedestal by the New Orleans city government on 16th May 2017.

The statue ended up in a Department of Homeland Security storage unit FIG. 20. Although no smoke, mist or sand appear in Lê’s photograph of the displaced general and the attendant Robert E. Lee, this image provides an indeterminate conclusion to the present author’s wider discussion of Lê’s fogs of war. It directly shows what Lê obliquely approached in the photographs discussed previously: an anteroom of collective images that await an uncertain fate. Placed on plywood pallets, Beauregard and Lee appear conspicuously out of place in Homeland Security’s makeshift cell. Still, they retain discernible identities. Trotting at a slow pace with hands firmly gripping the reins, Beauregard appears as a distinguished general, while Lee adopts a more pensive mood as he gazes outwards at an unknown prospect.

When they remained in place, these statues made clear political statements to whoever saw them. Shorn from their heroic pedestals, however, their meaning is curiously indeterminate. Will they be destroyed, melted down and forgotten, like so many statues in the past? Will they be installed in a critical context to illustrate the darker side of America’s history and present? Or, in the worst case, could they be restored to support a political imaginary in which Confederate heroes have a place of honour? Although such choices would inevitably involve the statues, their consequence lies in the shaping of the memory of the American Civil War. To return to Nguyen’s metaphor, this anteroom shows that war’s imaginary face exists only in a state of transformation. The Civil War, like the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War, is not even past, but resonates in the active stewardship of memory in the agonistic present. In these moments, fog lies less in the frame than on the horizon of an undetermined future.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Noam Elcott for his incisive commentary and guidance as I developed this piece, as well as the organisers of the 2024 Berkeley-Stanford SFMoMA Symposium for providing the opportunity to present an earlier draft as a talk.