 Welcome to the visual art forums. This is the second to last visual art forums for this semester. And I just want to remind everyone that the last one will be on March 30th. We'll be having Shannon Stratton, who's the director curator of Three Walls in Chicago. It's also at 6 p.m. here in the lecture hall. So I just wanted to welcome everyone and I'm going to pass this over to Kate Rimmer to introduce our next O'Dayne Distinguished Artist in Residence, Ann Mee Lee, who is going to do a talk for this evening. So please join me in welcoming Kate Rimmer. Thanks. She's so special, she needs two people to introduce her. It's my great pleasure to introduce Ann Mee Lee, sorry, our O'Dayne Distinguished Visiting Artist. Before I do, though, I'd like to invite everyone to a reception after the talk at the Charles Cut Gallery. Ann Mee was born in Saigon and fled to the U.S. with her family at the end of the Vietnam War. Growing out of that experience, Ann Mee's photographic work is centered on the realities and fictions of war in the military. She has trained her camera on re-enactments of battles from the Vietnam War in works such as Small Wars and 29 Palms. More recently, she's been photographing U.S. military installations around the world. Ann Mee has a BAS and an MS from Stanford University and an MFA from Yale. She has taught at Bard since 1998. Ann Mee's work has been shown at numerous galleries throughout the world and is in prestigious collections such as the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney. Please welcome Ann Mee Lee. Thank you, Kate. Thank you for having invited me to Vancouver and I'm so looking forward to starting my residency this summer. Vancouver has a great tradition, a photographic tradition with all these wonderful artists working here, so I'm really thrilled to be here. I just finished this project that took me about nine years. Am I standing in the right place? That took me about nine years and completed a book that was published at the end of the fall last year. And so I feel so free and have been sort of going back and looking at different projects and throwing around ideas for new projects. And I sort of feel like I can do anything which I think is a mistake because one cannot, as an artist, one cannot do just about anything. That's the way I feel. I think the other important consequences of having finished this project also has made me look at how permeable the walls between the projects that I always felt were so structured actually are. And so I sort of put together a bunch of slides to kind of show you a little bit where my mind is right now and it's kind of like all over the place. These are pictures of Haidt's city and I was asked to give a lecture a few years back and I chose to do it on his work. I've always been fascinated by a lot of the man art, on his in particular. And I found his very vocative in relationship to the work that the military, the Seabees did in Vietnam constructing flatlines and trenches and all sorts of other military installations. I found a visual and also contextual similarity. These are some more GIs during the Vietnam War. And this is Haidt's and some of the work by the Seabees. This is the entrance to the Khu Chi tunnel in southern Vietnam and it was a network of these very intricate tunnels that the Viet Cong built to wage a war underground during the Vietnam War. And this is a bit of a drawing. And these are very recent pictures and I just took these with my cell phone because I just got my contact sheets back last week. This was kind of a gift. I was invited by this Hollywood director to come down and photograph on the set of this civil war film that he was filming outside of New Orleans. And you can see trenches. So something very connected to some of the images I've shown before. An image from the press. A napalm in Vietnam. And more pictures from the set that I took. Another picture from the set. Haidt's, sir. Something else that I've been working on is this porn film that I found. One of the rare ones and I won't go too much in detail because there are some young children sitting here. It's a very unusual film. I don't know exactly when it was made but it's happening in the landscape and the setting is actually quite incredible. So it's a recreation of a Vietnamese village and there are unspeakable acts that are going to happen and so I've been looking at them and trying to transform them and incorporate them in my work. This is Laird Borrows. More pictures from the film set. And I have some much more gory ones. And then from that porn film as well. A picture I made of a reenactor, a Vietnam War reenactor. This is from the porn and this is from a real Marine. So I think where my head is is that it's all a mix and it's all interchangeable whether we're talking about reenactment, whether we're talking about Hollywood, whether we're talking about the Marines and the Navy training for war or even being at war. And it's also called Theatre of War. I have been in the Gulf and photographed that. So it's all a big mess. And I think my work has tried to make sense out of it and after having finished all these projects I just realized that it's really all coming together in an interesting and evocative way. So now I'll go back chronologically and talk about the different projects. I, like Kate mentioned, I was born in Vietnam and in 1960 I was 15 when the war ended. And pretty much I would say that my entire younger life was determined by the conflict in Vietnam and by American foreign policy. And I think that so much of my work has been to try to make sense out of that. None of these projects were ever planned with the idea of them each being a puzzle and a master plan. I think I was interested in one single idea and just pursued it. And once I finished it, moved on to the next one that seemed somewhat to make sense. I think ultimately in the end they all worked together. There are three bodies of work in black and white. The first one was made in Vietnam when I was able to return to Vietnam in the mid-1990s when relationships with Vietnam were normalized. And so for Vietnamese-American it was safe to return home. The second body of work was an exploration of these young men that I discovered who reenacted the Vietnam War. And the third one is about the Marine Corps training in 29 Palm. So in their own way historically in terms of this play between fiction and training they all sort of talk to each other about memories of war about training for war and about readiness for war and I think also morally whether we are prepared to deal with the consequences of war. But they were really started out as very single projects. So this is Vietnam. I had just come out of graduate school and wasn't quite ready to think of myself as a landscape photographer which is the way I see myself now. I had been pushed in graduate school to work that was more biographical. Where are you in the pictures? I did not come from a very arty background. I studied sciences and discovered photography by chance. And so as soon as I hit the ground in Vietnam I realized that I wanted to sort of make tangible this idea that I had of what it would have been like to have had an uninterrupted and somewhat peaceful childhood. I wanted to reconnect with stories I heard living in exile about life in Vietnam. I wanted to hear about the landscape and I started making these pictures that had so much to do with scale. For me, scale is extremely important. I think people change, buildings get torn down but the landscape and the idea of scale is something that endures forever. I think that the landscape has been fascinating to artists for many years because it is a place where it's a fascinating place to have a dialogue between culture, history there's a certain incredible dynamic between the wilderness and human endeavor and I think it all gets displayed within a sense of scale and that's what I realized that I could do as a photographer. I had been working with a large format camera also and I realized that the larger negative and I used five by seven negative provides the kind of details and the sense of space and the sense of physicality in a large print that was very important to convey this sense of scale and this sense of something greater than us that survives beyond a war, beyond any kind of destruction. I was so thrilled when I made this picture and it was in the Delta of the Mekong I had seen pictures of helicopters like you did landing in the rice fields and a wounded being evacuated but I was never really able to go into the Delta because of the first fighting that took place so it was not very safe and so it was a real first connection for me and so I made this picture and it's kind of a fictional family too that I put together. I photographed a lot of soccer games I grew up playing soccer in Vietnam there are a lot of pictures of children as well but the landscape was what really took my breath away. I went to Vietnam every year for about four or five years and would spend a month or up to three months there and the project went on for quite a long time I'm a pretty slow worker and towards the end I got very frustrated with making the same kind of pictures and I started making pictures that were more ambiguous I actually went to the DMZ and obviously up until then I sort of ignored the issue of war and it was sort of the big elephant in the room so I went to the DMZ and photographed things that could be taken for war so this is a slash and burn in an agricultural practice and I made a number of pictures like that and I returned home and I processed all that work and edited it and felt that it was finished and then I heard about these young men who re-enacted the Vietnam War and I felt that it was such a great opportunity to maybe try to go down and figure out what to do with them and explore the past and explore this idea of the Vietnam War finally I wasn't quite sure what I would find so I contacted these guys and they invited me down it was all by invitation it's happening in North Carolina and Virginia and so this is what I found and these guys are very conservative guys who perhaps missed a calling in the military perhaps they had a father who distinguished themselves in combat in Vietnam perhaps they lost a much older brother and they sort of came together to exchange a lot of things they collected to try to have some kind of virtual experience they were incredibly rigorous in what they wore, how they recreated things the conditions for me being invited was that I would have to be in character and they gave me a number of choices they gave me what you could be a combat photographer you could be a North Vietnamese soldier you could be a Viet Cong you could be a nurse and I asked them what would give me the most flexibility in terms of moving back and forth and they said would be a Viet Cong and then you captured and then you can go on the other side and turncoat I said alright so they made me order of Vietnamese made pajamas my husband couldn't come so I had my girlfriend who's a photographer come she's blonde and we both had black pajamas I have to say when I put on the pajamas it was a very disturbing moment but you know you do what you do what you got to do to make the pictures and so here we are and the hut back there is where we slept the first night and this is sort of a spontaneous camp for the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese army the GIs are up on the hill and it mirrors the reality of the war when you think about it the guys who were more fit and had less of a budget would be North Vietnamese soldiers or Viet Cong because the uniform cost less and you could improvise and you would do desert boots and the SKS guns cost less and then the guys who had more money and were not necessarily as well fit they're up on the hill and we ambushed them and they had AI mattresses and the guns are more expensive and everything's more expensive so it's interesting they don't keep track of who killed who but they have these kind of loose scenarios and they used me as part of the scenario as part of the surprise sometimes I'd come out of a jar behind a rice jar and ambush somebody it was pretty creepy and intense this is me these are all snapshots that I made on one of the first events before I could figure out exactly what I wanted to do and this is a real of course of Viet Cong much more confidence and more confidence I think we all know this picture and these guys reenacted and I quickly real and I made the picture of course how could you not and I quickly realized that I didn't really want to recreate the horror of war because what was the point I had lived through some of it and I sort of carried I think the guilt and the difficulty of the horror of it and I thought what else could you explore and I think the landscape was always interesting to me the landscape of strategy that's something I was heard in the brain in Vietnam and how treacherous and how unprepared Americans were so I wanted to look at that I also wanted to look at this idea of these young men reenacting and I remember still going to any bookstore and seeing this incredible cultural shelf of books on the Vietnam War and thinking about how the myth of the war the myth of the country so unresolved and so huge in Americans cultural imagination and that would be interesting to explore I also from the previous picture I made a print and this is from a 6x9 negative I think or 6x7 I can't remember I think it's 6x9 I quickly realized it just didn't have the quality the physical presence of a large format negative and so I decided that I should try my best to continue with a large format camera and I think it's important and most of your students here to consider your tools every time you start a new project and it made me very nervous to try to go down there and run after these guys with a large format camera but I quickly remembered that Timothy O'Sullivan photographed the Civil War and Barnard and all of those guys photographed the Civil War and of course you can go back to Le Gré who photographed the maneuvers for Napoleon they did it and so I could do it and I think I also got really encouraged by the fact that they photographed before the event and they photographed after the event it's not always necessary to be in the heat of the action and that kind of work can give you a physical distance could also be an intellectual distance that could be interesting and so these are the pictures and of course I quickly realized that the landscape was also an important character now you have Vietnam in North Carolina and Virginia and that transformation is so great having grown up watching or in college watching the Vietnam War movies I also realized that often they were not shot in Vietnam Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines many movies are shot in Malaysia I could tell from the color of the grass or the rice field I could tell from Full Metal Jacket that the palm trees were the wrong palm trees because they came from North Africa and he was also shot in the studio so that idea of the landscape as character in film, in reenactments was very provocative for me the transformation of the landscape this is a field with grazing cows and the next day it was perfect to become a landing zone and all you had to do was crack a can of smoke and it was from what I was told by my military advisor I'll tell you the story later it was perfect for a landing zone these guys grew bamboo on the land to give vocational authenticity they learned how to pose from watching movies the smoking and all of that and it's so interesting watching the more recent movies of the Gulf War and realizing and also after spending more time with the military guys to realize that they also get the inspiration before they go to war from watching Hollywood films this is one of the more intricate pictures and it's a Vietnam era jet that these guys were spending the weekend reenacting with I was not able to take any pictures so I made them come back on another weekend and this is a process that I developed working with them that I needed to kind of stop them and get their attention and the time to be able to set up a picture I was I was a little disturbed at first by how kind of phony those guys look at first I think before I decided that it was important to make the point that this is a reenactment and I remember Jeff Wall actually came to BART to give a lecture and I've been teaching at BART for a while and he asked me that I was working on and I told him about these and I said it annoys me so much because they just don't look real they just don't know what to do they don't give me the time, they don't give me the attention and he said we should start paying them and then make them rehearse and of course he explained the whole thing and I considered it seriously but then I quickly realized that if I did that and there won't be that sort of tension, that fakeness then it would take away from the fact that I wanted to speak about this culture of reenacting the night battles was what came closest to what I experienced during the war and I think I used to say until fairly recently that I didn't really care about the performative aspect of my work in some of these pictures, you know, I'm the sniper and I'm in the next picture it was really out of utility that I placed myself in the picture because there were no other Asian women around but to be honest I actually really enjoyed participating and having this kind of control and being able to shoot at those guys and this is me and the special force guy after I have been captured and turned coat and became a Kit Carson scout so I'm teaching in Vietnamese and this idea of the beauty in war and maybe a bit of romance in war is something that is not often spoken about too as I was finishing that and getting a little frustrated with working with these guys we built up the invasion to Iraq in March of 2003 when we invaded Iraq I became extremely anxious about the situation thinking about the young men and women who were going to be shipped to war and thinking about the effect of war on their lives and on their family lives and on their community I immediately thought that I should become an embed and go to Iraq but it was way too late and as I was doing my research and I got on the waitlist to be an embed I came across pictures of the Marines training outside of Los Angeles near Joshua a tree in a place called 29 Palms and I contacted the base and was invited to come and photograph one of the exercises I thought it was just perfect after Vietnam in Virginia why not Iraq, Afghanistan outside of LA it was quite a feat to get the people in charge of training to invite me back multiple times I was able to go quite a number of times per year for 2 or 3 years I think the fact that the pictures were in black and white the pictures were also large and full of details and look more like art made them more open to my frequent visits these pictures sort of I think pushed me further in my exploration of the landscape in relationship to military activity I think it's a great site for contemplation this kind of militarized landscape I think that without the action without the immediate destruction that you see in pictures of war that are shown on the online newspapers you can step back and you can consider other things I think that the scale here makes you think about toys it makes you think about a force that's much greater than us that looms over these mountains and perhaps and hopefully it may make you consider the futility of war it's all life fire at 29 palms it's tricky to navigate you can also not ask them to do something again the way I was able to work with the reenactors but I think as I spent more and more time with them the trainers just sort of gave me more flexibility they would tell me ahead of time of what was happening if the weather was not good I may be able to come back the next day in the military landscape everything becomes much more emphasized I think a bit of smoke a truck crossing the landscape everything matters I found that very provocative I also love the fact that this is the same landscape that Timothy O'Sullivan photographed at the turn of the century when he was doing his survey of the west and this is my homage to that picture we know very well of the horse drawn carriage that he has so much of war is also waiting even though this is straining you just hurry up and get ready and then you just sit around and wait forever and I quickly realized that the skirmishes happen in the amount of time and the rest of the time it's to get organized to figure out the land to figure out your gear to solve all sorts of problems you have and again the landscape is what's really looming and overpowering the night battles there and I witnessed the last one they had in a really long time because this kind of training became inappropriate for the Iraq war the night battles were extraordinary and so obscene at the same time it was the most beautiful the most sublime thing I've ever experienced it lasted 20 minutes they had jets dropping bombs they were tracers everywhere howitzers mortars and then the grunts are in the foxhole firing and I think everyone was either in their tanks or in the foxhole we each had a camera we were the only people outside and we watched this whole thing and the power, the amount of power the devastation is just incredible but it's also so extraordinary the tenure of the training quickly changed after that it became more urban training and this was right at the beginning of the war 2004 2005 and so they grabbed an abandoned officer's housing and just crawled all of this graffiti and eurograms on top and it's so ironic because so much of the graffiti is very telling and it's like kill bush, I go home and anything you can think of that would be appropriate and with double meanings go away and a lot of this work in 29 Palms was very reminiscent of the back lot of the Hollywood film too they used the same language as the reenactors, they talk about scenarios they talk about planning and preparing and it really made me think about something that perhaps is very American in the sense that it's a culture that thinks perhaps if you keep training for something you'll get it right or if you if something that wasn't quite right happened perhaps if you reenact it maybe you could right the wrong this idea of reenacting the Vietnam war and being friendly with the enemy and respect the enemy as I was finishing 29 Palms the Marines who were training there invited me on to their next training mission which is off the coast of California and they train on these ships because they're part of an expeditionary unit and this is how they get shipped off to Iraq and Kuwait and so they said do you want to come and visit and I said sure why not I would say yes and then I went home and thought about it and thought well it was a landscape photographer after the desert maybe I should look at the ocean and I really didn't think too far I knew that the ocean held great mysteries and great fascination for me I mean it's a place that is awesome but it feels people with anxiety that idea of the 19th century exploration across the oceans and across fountiers the idea of borders all of that was fascinating to me but I wasn't quite sure what I would do and of course I love Gustave Le Gray and I thought I'd just make pictures of military ships at sea and that would be the end so this first trip turned into a project that lasted nine years and it took me to all the continents in the world the Arctic Antarctic included I've spent 24 hours in a submarine not far from the North Pole I've been to South Pole Station it was sort of obsessive but I really felt that I needed to see everything I quickly realized that the military in this age of globalism the military is just like one of those corporations and so it's global it's everywhere they try to do humanitarian missions they try to gather information they try to support science of course they're at war in the Gulf they also try to train with other nations and so I really wanted to explore all of it I switched to color because after taking this picture I quickly realized that and I made the same one in black and white I quickly realized that black and white could not express a metal that's cold versus another grey that's warmer and perhaps color would be more appropriate I also felt that this body of work would not have some kind of concept that is either reenactment or training or landscape that's not what it is it's unfolding in real time and it's exactly what it is and so perhaps it should be in color but it's actually more real but that creates other kinds of problems and other challenges because now suddenly I feel that it brings me so close to photojournalism so the issue then is how do you distinguish yourself from photojournalism and that kind of work but I think that that question I will answer later so I traveled everywhere I tried to see as many operations as possible as I embarked on one ship I would learn about another another trip and another exploration and so it just went on and on after I finished I sort of thought about how I should put everything together and there's so many different locations so many different types of landscape it was so confusing I think what I did was that I just started dividing the pictures in types instead of location and so for example here you would have all the types of pictures of ship further at sea in different locations and here you would have the different kinds of trainings and here the portraits which I started making and quickly it became evident what was repetitive what was important what was essential and I came up with this idea that perhaps the work should be more of a kind of essay and it would be a sort of travel that would take one through the world of the military in this particular case it was the navy and so I'm structuring the last part of the talk based on the book and the way the book was constructed and with some excerpts so the book starts out with Ferris landscape that you see when you join the military and you start traveling so here you are in Panama this is California this is in the Bering Sea Antarctica Australia and this is the beginning of the book and here I start introducing the military and a bit of what the aircraft carrier is the main platform of the military it's kind of like their floating bases there's so few American stationary landlocked American bases anymore that they really depend on these aircraft carriers and this is a bit of the what they do I think the main function of an aircraft carrier is to support these fighter jets that go out to gather intelligence to drop bombs and they mostly function in the Gulf to support the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and it's actually a four panel picture this is what they do every morning before flight ops happen all of the people working on the deck sort of line up and walk up and down the flight decks to look for small pieces of metal that may be straight and would get sucked up into a jet and would destroy a couple million dollar jet and so they do this every morning it's called a fought walk foreign object detection and this next picture is the same thing that I made much earlier I think in 2005 and this one is a more recent one from perhaps 2010 and I try to do this every time I am on an aircraft carrier and the reason why I'm showing this is this whole idea of what's the difference between photojournalism or perhaps a picture of an aircraft carrier that you would see in National Geographic and what I'm trying to do I think and I really respect what photojournalists do and what travel photographers do but would have different objectives I think this picture sort of captures something else that has nothing to do with the fact of looking for these metal objects and it's about this young man and woman kind of lining up and becoming horizon and if you look at the it's a huge print and you can really see the details and the individuality in their faces and in their body language as you get close and so it's been kind of reduced to sort of this essence of a kind of human endeavor on this aircraft carrier versus just the idea of the fought walk and a bit more of this is one of the more action packed picture on the flight deck and I think just a note before we move into the first chapter of the book that it's fiction or maybe it's still in the movies you know you have this huge search light on the side that for me echoes the set of a Hollywood film perhaps and he's looking out at the sea and if you overlook the guns he could just be a passenger on a cruise ship looking out and so this idea of there's a fine line between I think all of the various worlds that I've been exploring and this is the first chapter and the first chapter is about the military then encountering entering other countries and encountering other cultures and this is what the Navy does it's called Manning the Rail and it's like a formal presentation and this is in Indonesia this is Haiti and this is right after the earthquake in 2010 I think I can't remember exactly and the American Navy with the only forces that could muster the power to bring ships and bring supplies very quickly to Haiti to help people and bring water and evacuate and take care of the wounded for me this picture is important because there's a really fine line here between coming and helping this idea of international aid and perhaps the idea of invading a country so when you have two cultures colliding whether it's the military world or the civilian world or a greater nation like the United States or smaller nations or imperialism versus international aid the line is really fine and it's the way these worlds collide that interests me more than actually just describing various operations and actions I also think that Americans are American men and the only ones who physically, American soldiers behave like this this idea of feeling so comfortable and feeling the space and these guys just arrive a few days before I did and they behave like they belong there and it's their space and here are some details I think the idea of human endeavor within a greater landscape that is very sublime the idea of order and disorder and this is a two panel and these are some details of the Marine Corps in Australia and I'm always interested in pictures that are much more ambiguous of course this the leader of this village is not striking his fist with the gesture of black power he's just pointing at something but that's what I was interested in and I love the fact that all these American Marine Corps who are actually there and supporting them and have all these great powers sitting down and looking at him and he's the overwhelming force and that was interesting to me to upend that our notions and our preconceptions and I think a lot of the pictures are about that they are about defying expectations and here are some details there's some kind of exchange that happens often when the Marines travel to various countries to develop relationships I love the fact that these guys just got hit grown men with toys and this is one of the this is Admiral Tyson until very recently was one of the woman Tyson commanding an operational job and she's amazing and she's with her counterpart who's Ty aircraft carrier and it looks like Martha Stewart came and decorated the whole place so and the second chapter is more about the workings of the ship and Robert McNamara the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War coined the word the fog of war and he talks about how you're so steeped in the policy and you're so steeped in making sure everything works that you don't really see the big picture and I think this diptych is very evocative of what he's trying to explain but in spite of the fog of war you have to keep things going and the day to day activities on the ship whether it's resupplying whether it's cleaning the ship is just constant and I wanted to try to explain that and I think I think people are the military is such a strange topic it it makes people suspect it makes people paranoid it riles people up and some people feel very patriotic about it some people feel so suspect of it and so I wanted to really see what it looks like and show what it looks like and the cleaning of the ship I photographed a lot of women because I and the pictures work and I'm not a portrait photographer I think they work because I was so interested in how competent they are and how they managed to kind of forge their own individuality within this world that is so structured and so mal-dominated and some of them try to be one of the guys like Grace here and some manage to find the tight fitting shirt and plug the eyebrows and look so attractive and feminine and she is I love the A it means that she's in charge of the arresting gear on an aircraft carrier it's not a scarlet A and then this very young woman who just joined and she's kind of at the bottom of the totem pole pictures that also work for me are the ones that speak a lot about what's not in the frame and as much as you know from the reenactors and from working with the view cameras you often have to direct you often have to set pictures up this is one of those pictures where it was exactly the way I saw it and I could not have imagined it in any better ways and here are some details I could not have directed these guys and sometimes it's just a gift from nature you know just giving a blow job and that's in the middle you know it replicates the exact you know I mean I couldn't have planned this any better and of course my daughter is not really listening and of course the the skies overwhelming the whole situation and this is a target practice and of course I photograph them shooting and this is maybe the fifth time that I've photographed this kind of activity and it really becomes not about the shooting but it's about something else and again it's when you get past the photographing of the action the objective part I think that's when it becomes really interesting because we all could imagine what it's like to practice target shooting the third chapter is kind of a a rogue chapter and it's I fitted all of the Antarctic and Greenland and Arctic pictures in there and it's that sense of being in a world with no frontiers and kind of uncolonized and the military does manage to get on this part. This is South Pole Station and it's interesting for me that Antarctic is the only continent in the world where there's never been a war and all these countries have signed a treaty to not do any kind of nuclear testing to try to preserve the environment and to not wage any war and quite a lot of countries have signed that treaty. This is the submarine that I went on and this is in the Arctic seas. This is South Pole Station again and it's incredible that we are everywhere and we've colonized every single square meters of the world pretty much. These guys have bone arrows and they're scientists actually working on dragging these walruses and they're supported by the Coast Guard on a mission in the Bering Sea and then that idea of the 19th century of the scientists kind of sending off this ship going on an exploration and the fourth chapters are sort of all of these pictures that make you question everything that you've seen or hopefully start making you think about the military at large and I'm interested in looking at their best attempts but I'm also interested in looking at the worst blunders. Land art again this is a five part piece and it's an aircraft carrier crossing the Suez Canal and I'm so interested in coming together of the military culture with the ancient culture in the background and I turned it into a five piece to show the passage of time and the continuity between the two cultures and the clashing of the two cultures and so it's the same point of view the ship is moving and it's so flat and the canal is so narrow that you don't see the water from certain points of view and I was so interested in that perspective and that play we're talking about a voyage and I think we forget in this age of air travel what it's like to travel on a ship and coming into a new country coming into a new port and how you slowly get ready for it and there's a band there to welcome you and there's a band there to send you off and it's a very emotional arrival and it's a very emotional departure there are a lot of strange things that go on also there are all these guys in the most bizarre place and this is in Comoros and they belong to the Navy and they're part of the Civil Affairs Service and they are there to teach English and they're there to help in the harbor and it's all very strange in the Navy or some sort of intelligence gathering and so I wanted to photograph them too you know we're back in Vietnam now so it's kind of a slowly closing of the loop the Americans are communicating with the worst enemy they actually formally started their first training and the Vietnamese asked the sailors to be in formal dress whites whenever they go into town which is very strange but the Navy accepted but it was an opportunity for me so I set up this picture of course which is echoes what happened during the Vietnam War this is on a hospital ship the Navy has two hospital ships and one was sent to Vietnam and it goes there regularly to perform these sort of medical missions for example cataract operations and other kinds of surgeries and it's kind of a win hearts and minds situation I saw the nun getting into the waiting room I mean I actually saw her on the small boat coming up onto the hospital ship and I sort of followed her and photographed her and then kind of created this whole situation when I asked my escort to sit down and he's actually a Buddhist too for me this picture is the play between the objective and the subjective and it's that tension it's when one supersedes the other that makes the picture most challenging and most satisfying and also provocative they both present such opposite things she's a Buddhist nun and he's part of the military they both wear uniforms they both have shaved heads but they are at polar opposites and they represent such opposite things but they're together in this room the Navy is very careful about its its appearance and creating a particular image and this speaks to that and this is in the portrait studio in the belly of an aircraft carrier and I love showing what's underneath the the formal jacket and wearing the wrong kinds of pants and then the fake clouds and the backdrops going back to the role of women I was also interested in the pageantry that comes with the uniform that comes with belonging structure and projecting authority and this must have been really strange for these Vietnamese officers having to relate to a finale captain she's the captain of the ship here again the single woman translator amongst many Indonesians and this is a training in Hawaii that happens every two years that the United States organizes and this is a detail the idea of the military again interacting with civilians and this is on the island of Cormoros and again you know the body language is just so telling I don't think that you would see this kind of body language and this kind of owning of the space in many other cultures and the three young men are seabees they are the mobile naval construction unit of the Navy this is Guantanamo and they are I think a transit camp that was set up right after the Haiti earthquake and this is the where a lot of the lawyers and these civil rights and human rights lawyers stay when they come they used to come to assist and to be present at the procedures for the prisoners of war and it's called Camp Justice of course and this is one of the last pictures I made right before I finished as I finished this book this is in Norfolk and it's simply just the explosive ordinance unit training some kind of scenario but discovering biohazard lab I was extremely frustrated I couldn't go down the tunnel and photograph what was inside they said I could only be on the outside and I decided to make a picture anyway without knowing that I would get this kind of result and so suddenly you have now this mythical creature with three legs and it's a predator in a menacing mask but I thought it was very metaphorical for the end of this book and some kind of a prescient message about this entire endeavor and again that idea of power and fragility are the themes that I try to address within the same picture using scale this is an enormous ship it's a tanker that's been converted to hospital ship and it's huge and I chose to photograph it from further away kind of drifting off to speak about power and fragility and a bit of religion you know this is the chapel of the snow it's the southernest church that one finds it's in Antarctica this is a woman guarding one of the oil platforms during the Iraq war off the coast of Iraq and she's looking at these sailors returning to Vietnam for the first time and again that idea of the closing of the loop and that perhaps history repeats itself the Americans are back in Vietnam so I don't know what else to say I guess I should say I think you know because there's so many students here when I went to school some of the issues and this is in the early 1990s at Yale the issues where well are your pictures set up or not set up what kind of ideas are you engaging in are you photographing in color are you not in color it was that kind of does it matter and I think in the end it doesn't matter and it still doesn't matter I mean I feel that I am a photographer and I think that this last body of work even though it's created challenges and I think it's made me anxious because it's so close to what just plain documentary photography is but I think at the same time it's the purest kind of photography that one that I feel that I could do but it speaks to me as an artist and it speaks to me as an artist because I think it's very personal it comes from from who I've been and what I've lived through and it has a particular affection for the military but I think it also raises questions and doubts about the military presence I think that it's important that it takes place in the real world because I don't really want that work to be thought of as a fantasy I think it has to unfold in the real world I always think that it's important that whether the work is personal or not it needs to transcend that specificity so that it has more impact and it can speak and be more accessible to more people and so I think it's something that I think about a lot I think at this point I'm making watercolors I'm thinking maybe I should show a picture that's from the reenactment with the picture that is from the film set and maybe I'll direct my own film so to go back to this kind of division of subject and topics and types of work and precepts and concepts it seems to me that it's all very porous and it all kind of feeds into each other but I love the image and I feel that there's really great strength in being able to talk about complicated subject matters with mostly images and simple titles and I think different people approach things in different ways I'm interested in limiting myself to that and I'm interested in really being there and experiencing whatever it is I'm interested in and kind of speak truth to power and bringing that experience back and kind of filtering it and producing these images so I hope you have some questions be happy to answer anything I actually shot some 35mm film a while back and maybe I could show that while answer some questions there's a question I just have a question for realizing this work you probably have to ask the government or the military for a lot of permission and a lot of maybe for grants or something I would be interested in how is the government how important is censorship for example or involvement of the government or the military itself for sure it required a lot of funding and I have to say I sort of dug myself deep in depth and whatever work I sold I would invest it back in here I think a couple projects came towards Vienna that sort of saved my life but in terms of the access they never really except for Guantanamo they never really looked at the pictures because I don't know why I think for the 29 Palms work I dealt with the local public affairs office and sort of gained his trust and explained what I was doing and perhaps because I was Vietnamese and he loved my stories he kept letting me come and you know it's a burden for that office to have somebody come they would have a crew from I don't know CBS come to view one training session but I would want to come back every day for a week and then a couple of months later and so it was really a burden on them and I have to say I don't know for the color work I had to ask permission from the Navy Office of Information and I had to put in a formal request and that took a lot of work and they sort of ratified my project but then every time I had to go on a ship or a new trip I would have to contact the local public affairs again and ask for permission so it was a real headache but I think if you look at that series that was on PBS on the aircraft carrier I think it was called Carrier the Navy actually let a crew of camera man live on the ship for six months and I think that they were on the verge of saying no and then they decided to say yes and I think when they saw the results they thought it was disastrous because they were footage of a seller calling home and his wife breaking up with him and people having nervous breakdowns and all this crazy stuff that was going on and they thought oh my god we don't really want it's too messy life on the aircraft carrier but in the end it really showed that life was real and it really did not affect the rate of the recruiting rate and so they feel that sometimes you show something real that perhaps it's to the advantage and they do want the publicity they don't really want to be seen as some kind of secretive structure so I don't know if I answered the question censorship or access it's a weird question I think the work is interesting in spite of the access I don't think people ask am I indebted to them because they let me on the ship and I worked so hard I don't think so but I certainly changed my opinion about the members of the military once I started spending more time with them I think when I first began working I didn't quite understand why anyone would want to join the military and then I quickly realized they do it for economic reasons they do it for some of them grew up wanting to be in combatant forces but they sort of checked out their decision making rights when they joined and then they just sort of follow and whether they agree with what is being done or not they just sort of follow because that was the deal but it doesn't mean that some of them are not incredible people and I develop quite a bit of empathy for individual members but I don't think that anyone asked Nan Golden are you are you indebted to your friends or do you show them in a particular way that's not quite right but Larry Clark when he photographed his circle of druggy friends I just have a question about sort of I'm interested in the earlier work the reenactment and the film set and I'm wondering in what ways the sort of like involvement of a fictionalized idea of war or how you consider that in relation to this very like real sort of systems of war and like what kind of similarities or differences come from that understanding and how the photographic image sort of flattens the differences or sort of conflates them together that's a really interesting question well I think the camera does something of working with a view camera I think it's obvious that sometimes you know you take a spontaneous picture but it requires a kind of working it requires a kind of preconception that somehow I think unifies the different subject matters and I think draws the color work with the other work and perhaps you know the Navy is not in the color work out there training all the time and there's some real action but I think there's a distance also in the way they perform everything we're not talking about the Marine Corps going into the field going into battle so it's still behind the line and I think in that way it unifies the different topics and I think to be honest it's all fiction for me they're all facts that I've picked together that I've strung together so maybe the color work looks more real but it's not I think it's all fiction so this idea of screwing the fine line between fiction and reality is not really doesn't make sense for me it's all fiction I mean I think it's just like a fiction writer or writer stringing together words and creating a sentence and writing a story for me it's all the same my question was going to be somewhat similar to the first the first one but I'm going to go a little bit farther with it because you had mentioned in one of your photos about how the military is very self-conscious about the kind of image that they put out so it begs the question that what control did they have in the ultimate final scene of the project did they have any yeah any kind of no nothing I think the only time they really controlled anything was when I was in Guantanamo and then also on the oil platform I think they were very careful about maybe not showing one gun in relationship to something else because strategically they felt that it would give away something about the security but then you know I explained to them what these are view camera pictures it's not digital you know this is I'm not going to post them on Instagram and back then Instagram didn't even exist this is in 2007 or something like that but for Guantanamo there was someone looking through my viewfinder every single time I made a picture again a question of strategy but otherwise they never really looked at anything they felt that that they were not showing me anything that they didn't want me to see so so yeah and I think I was nervous at times inviting them to exhibitions I've had and I've had exhibitions different times before I finished a project and I was never quite happy with the exhibitions because I felt that it only showed perhaps one aspect of this big topic and I felt the book itself is multifaceted enough that it showed the subject of the Navy or this particular in my view of the Navy in all its facets but I've invited them a few times and very nervous about their response but I felt I had to because you know over nine years I think I've out what's the word run I think three or four public affairs offices they rotate every three years and by the time I got to my fourth public affairs office I said so what are you doing what is this book you know why we keep saying yes so I started having to invite them to see the shows and they said well that lawn chair why didn't you why didn't somebody move that or you know they would notice little things that they wanted to rearrange and I tried to explain well I'm interested between domesticity and the military and power and this okay interesting one last thing as a socially engaged photographer myself photo based artist I sometimes get so involved with my subject matter that is highly charged that sometimes I forget what's my objective what my objective is because I get so involved like in a so in something that's highly charged like you said military is quite a highly charged right people have very strong feelings one way or the other it's not a subject that's just okay you know and so she American military like the largest in the world but and I find myself when I'm involved in my project that are very politically charged I sometimes get lost in what I'm doing I'm wondering if you ever get so immersed in what you're doing that you kind of to go like I was seen that what happened more where you'd say well okay hold on what am I doing here what's my what's my role what's my objective did you ever experience that like a sort of a losing of the boundaries of where where your art started and where your role was oh yeah of course but I have I have great very smart friends that I consult regularly and my husband is one of them and they kind of keep me on track but yes it's very easy to to get lost and I think for me it was very easy to get lost on wanting to go back on the aircraft carrier one more time because I love landing with a hook you know going from 200 miles per hour to zero miles per hour in three seconds you know who wouldn't want to do that so yeah you get lost and you get carried away and as much as you think the picture is great because you love meeting that person or you love that situation and then someone else would say well but the picture is not good you know so it's that same you just have to be you know hardcore blunt and unemotional and I think someone else would do it better than you so you just have to get those people to help you out I just got one last question right here thanks so much for showing us your great work it's over here it's good to start the other film and I heard you say a couple of times you mentioned the word watercolor and so I was just thinking well would you care to elaborate a little bit or to talk about what you're doing yes the film got me started on making portraits and made me realize that I should try to make portraits of other colors yes so that short you know it's about trying to transform something and I suppose I could scan those film stills and degrade them and reprint them but I'm interested in labor and to be honest I have no skills I did not learn how to draw I don't know how to draw I don't know how to paint I don't know anything but I was interested and I felt that perhaps I could learn and then maybe in the awkwardness and in my lack of skills perhaps something could come about and I thought it could be a nice way to transform those film stills and I think of course the next step would be to go on one of those sets and I am actually thinking about that and I think that it's actually a real genre, this idea of the fetish of the uniform in porn and straight and gay porn okay I think we should probably wrap it up now so if anyone has other questions for Ann Me maybe they can ask her at the reception so thanks again for your talk