At this time of crisis, I find great comfort in returning to nature, the wilderness, the richness and vast scale of the land. It has shaped the Ameri… - An-My Lê

Most art photographers understand and often benefit from or engage with the fact that their medium plays a role in journalism, as evidence, propaganda…this is something we know. But the ambitions of the grey areas of subjectivity and experimentations one finds in photography is what I relate too. Color brings my work dangerously close to photojournalism. I rely on the tension between the objective and subjective within a picture to complicate a photograph. I also depend on a carefully crafted sequence of images in a sort of “essay” form to explore a complicated subject.

War photographers were always placed on a pedestal. They put their lives at risk. Of course it is still very dangerous, but it also seems that now, there could just as easily be a civilian taking the picture. Maybe it is less a question of whether war photography will continue, and more a question of whether this idea of the heroic, self-sacrificing combat photographer will live on.

While my return to Vietnam was intensely emotional, connecting to the landscape allowed me to disengage somewhat and gain perspective. I wanted to show Vietnam in a way I had not seen it shown before—not devastated, not victimized, not romanticized. I felt I could do that best through my exploration of the landscape.