Gazing into the Abyss

Though she’s known for sweeping images of nature, the built environment and buzzing human activity within either, An-My Lê has never considered herself a landscape photographer. In 1994, she returned to her native Vietnam for the first time since fleeing with her family to the United States in 1975. “As soon as I arrived, the landscape was what spoke to me. I understood the scale, I understood the designing, in the way a landscape is drawn,” recalls Lê, 65. While many might imagine a division between land and sky as core to the composition, the artist considers it a more complex matter. “It’s similar to a way a landscape architect would work,” she says. “You can allow the viewer to enter a photograph, you lead them through the landscape to give them a more physical experience.” The landscape as a record of human labor and history of development has also been a hallmark of Lê’s more than three-decade oeuvre, as seen in her lauded Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 2023. 

Building on this area of interest, two new series by Lê emerge as a cohesive narrative in her solo show at Marian Goodman, “Dark Star/Grey Wolf.” Taken first in Montana, “Grey Wolf” is named after the military helicopter model that ushered her across the Big Sky State as she captured images of the nuclear silos sprawled across plains and farmland, seemingly pristine save for the innocuous patches of metal concealing warheads. The presence of these weapons of mass destruction was so subtle that it became a point of fascination. “I was so taken by the sort of quotidian look of the farmland as we flew over Montana. From the air, it looks extraordinary,” she says. “Then the view of those silos from the air—they are only protected by simple fencing and surveillance cameras. You would probably not even pay attention to them.”

To create a contrast with the seven photographs of Montana’s silos—which are presented in a 360-degree cyclorama—Lê wanted to offset what she describes as “the whole idea of our nuclear arsenal and power.” This comes to fruition in “Dark Star” with a series of nighttime vistas in Mesa Verde, Colorado, which feature the Milky Way as the sole light source. The stark elegance of the night sky, isolated from the intrusive interruptions of post-industrial civilization, stands in opposition to the glimpses of cutting-edge defense technology concealed by the Montana wilds. “Nuclear power is about harnessing solar power, and then you have cosmology and the stars,” says Lê. “It's about the beginning and the end of the world”: from how ancient civilizations, like those once settled at Mesa Verde, looked to the stars to anchor agrarian and religious rituals—to human development culminating in a potentially apocalyptic invention.

Lê’s movements as a photographer, too, continue this juxtaposition: On one hand, she gained a bird’s eye perspective of Montana’s nuclear silos thanks to military-grade aviation (in one shot, the shadow of her helicopter lingers on the ground in silent silhouette). In Mesa Verde, her orientation within the vast, dark landscape came from the stars, the guiding lights for those who lived there thousands of years earlier. As the artist reflects, “It’s all connected, you know?”‍

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“Dark Star/Grey Wolf” is on view through Feb. 22, 2025 at Marian Goodman at 385 Broadway New York, NY 10013.