A must-see exhibit at the Carter features a photographer’s powerful view on society

A new photography exhibit features Vietnam War reenactments, service members in training and at work, the removal of Confederate statues, and behind the scenes images of a Matthew McConaughey film.

“On Contested Terrain,” An-My Lê’s midcareer survey of 78 photographs, runs from April 18 through August 8 at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1960, Lê was airlifted out of the country by the US military prior to the Fall of Saigon in 1975. She became a refugee in the United States, earned an MFA at Yale, and is currently a professor at Bard College.

In 1994, she returned to her home country and created the first series included here, “Viêt Nam.” Using black and white film and a large-format camera, Lê juxtaposed images of modern Vietnam with traditional agricultural scenes that resembled the environment she was raised in her home country.

Focusing on landscapes but including people with a formal and classical approach, Lê created her signature style with this series. Images of buildings pockmarked with bullets and the country’s subtropical plants—as opposed to regions stripped by Napalm—address war in a less sensational way than it has been represented in Hollywood films.

“She’s interested in the legacy of war and the effects of it,” said Kristen Gaylord, the Carter’s assistant curator of photographs. “But she’s not interested in graphic violence. She doesn’t show combat.”

Lê did, however, photograph and participate in reenactments of the Vietnam War for her next series. “Small Wars” perfectly captures the place between photojournalism and fiction she explores in her work.

Studying the Vietnam War from the American perspective, Lê learned of men in forests located in North Carolina and Virginia. Like American Civil War hobbyists, these men were obsessed with authenticity and agreed to be photographed only if Lê took part. She grew up in southern Vietnam but appears in this series as a North Vietnamese soldier, Viet Cong rebel, or a trader helping Americans.

Lê even wears a black jumpsuit and points a sniper rifle at a couple of the American reenactors in one image, “Sniper I, 1999-2002.”

“This is something that feels especially relevant with the rise in violence against Asian Americans,” Gaylord said. “She didn’t meet any combat veterans. She met people who were working through issues related to the war that she escaped. Some of the guys got really into it and screamed problematic stuff at her.”

For her next project in 2003, Lê hoped to be embedded on the frontlines of the Iraq War but ended up in the San Bernardino County Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center known as 29 Palms. Captured in training exercises and downtime, the soldiers are in an area that resembles Afghanistan and Iraq. The site was also used by Marines preparing for the Vietnam War.

With buildings meant to resemble Iraqi towns and exercises that included cadets dressed up like Iraqis, Lê was again photographing reenactments of war. Surrounded by an enormous desert, the men and their tanks sometimes resemble tiny plastic toys and seem to disappear into the rocks.

These are enormous images, but Lê’s wide field of focus reveals dust, shadows and light, and the bored expressions of soldiers with an amazing level of detail. This showcases Lê’s skills as a photographer as well as the way she puts her compositions together as carefully as a painter.

For her next series, “Events Ashore,” Lê uses color film and begins to photograph service members at work with real military equipment. Taken while Lê was aboard naval vessels traveling from Antarctica to Greenland, these photographs still look staged. Images of aircraft personnel scrubbing the USS Ronald Reagan clean or teaming up to handle a high-pressure hose, for instance, look theatrical enough to be scenes from a Broadway play.

In 2015, Lê began her ongoing road trip series, “Silent General,” in New Orleans when Confederate statues where being removed. Similar to her work in Vietnam, many of these photographs capture common people and landscapes. This series also includes behind the scenes images of Matthew McConaughey’s 2016 war drama, “Free State of Jones.”

Throughout her career, Lê’s work has conveyed her complicated relationship with the US military, who fought a disastrous war in her home country but also rescued her. Instead of glorifying the material or offering criticism, she approaches it with a poetic sense of history.