Meeting the Devil Halfway: A Conversation on Photography, Writing, and History

AML: You know, I was trying to work out so many issues with this work which became Small Wars. These reenactments are not what you think they are. Obviously, there is the photographic part which is always front and center, but the emotional motivation was also essential.

LT: It seemed strange to me, yes, in part because I knew nothing about you then. But when I did, I kind of understood it as the effects of trauma. What you had lived through.

AML: Maybe we can take a quick step back to what preceded Small Wars. I had spent five years photographing in Vietnam from the moment the US renewed diplomatic and economic relations in 1994. When we were evacuated from Saigon in 1975, we never thought we could return. Setting foot there in 1994 unleashed so many emotions. I was less interested in a geopolitically informed survey than I was in trying to give shape, through landscape photography, to the Vietnam I had nurtured and probably invented while in exile. Memory and imagination are personal and reactive, not unlike the act of photography itself. I never felt I actively avoided larger issues or direct references to war, but early on friends and colleagues were peppering me with questions and advice: “What about the war?”

LT: They didn’t perform for an audience, but for each other, don’t you think? Or for themselves. To be part of the past, or maybe they knew people, family, friends, who had been in that war, were killed or maimed. Reenactments of war seem to me to be about some kind of trauma they had experienced, not because of that war, but because of violence they experienced early in their lives. They must have been reenacting something close to them, and maybe unknown to them.

AML: I think both the reenactors and I were searching for an elusive experience, something ineffable. We spent more time preparing our sleep camp and doing reconnaissance through the woods than skirmishing. I didn’t want these men to replicate the horrors of war for my camera. It made sense that we came together to construct a version of war where everyone walked away unscathed. We “played” in this allegorical world where the terrain was a simulation, where good and bad guys easily traded places, and kill shots were logged by the honor system. Most important, I learned what it means to work with your imagination and not from your imagination. It’s not about illustrating an idea or a memory. I am committed to describing life, but I also wanted to riff on it. I see my photographs as road maps where I have described and deployed an array of visual facts that I hope will absorb the viewer on multiple levels. And my wish is that this will ignite some sort of symphonic relational web of ideas and associations. A lot of [the series] Silent General is inspired by current events. I know how I feel but I try not to dictate how it should be for the viewer. I hope to draw the viewer in with well-described facts and details in order to push them to think about what’s beyond the frame.

LT: Silent General is powerful, and brings to mind the rush to monumentalize 9/11, after which many of the victims’ families demanded something be built immediately. Mourning was in a sense displaced by a desperation to replace loss somehow. Your photographs of the Robert E. Lee statues whisper history, an aspect of American history trapped, maybe gagged. Lee shouldn’t be honored, the Old South and slavery shouldn’t be, but I wonder how the Civil War will be taught, and Reconstruction, then Jim Crow, and more horrific discrimination. How and what history is told, how to teach future generations—do monuments do that? I think the Vietnam memorial works, because it focuses on the death of individuals, there’s no glory about that war. What if a plaque on Lee’s statue said Lee fought to support an abominable system that enslaved thousands of Black people? In one of my Madame Realism story/essays, she visits the Normandy beaches. Thousands of soldiers were killed on D-Day. I called the piece “Lust for Loss,” because the death drive Freud theorized does seem a reality. Those soldiers fought to defeat Germany, I revere that ideal, and it was a great turning point in the war. But I also question the effectiveness of monuments.

AML: You talk about the premise of wandering mentally in the same breath as setting up ideas and opinions. It’s the prospect of rigor and intuition coexisting that appeals to me. The head and the heart leading the way, well, maybe not at the same time. My version of a maximalist effort is to engage with a polarizing subject matter and not fear embracing all its contradictions. You need to meet the devil halfway. Examining US military forces across vast geopolitical forces and intersecting borders means having to contend with their best intentions and worst blunders. I would like to think that photography does allow one to express affinities but also doubts and contradictions as well. Would you talk more about the significance of MR being female?

LT: I like that—to meet the devil halfway. Younger writers, often women writers, talk to me about my female characters who are cerebral, intellectual, who don’t align with most female characters they’ve read. Rebellious, funny, ironic characters, so Madame Realism maybe does meet the devil halfway. She’s on her own in strange spaces. I might say of her, she models another way, makes her own way. My writing is not all about family and love relationships, and that’s deliberate, it includes how I live, how I want to live, and how I don’t myself live. Other people’s lives come into anything I write. Your work also veers away from so-called traditional female issues and roles.

AML: Growing up, I had been obsessed with the North Vietnamese female warriors. (There were no women in combat in South VN or in the American military at the time.) They were heroicized by North Vietnamese propaganda and they were mythologized in American films like Full Metal Jacket. This got me to do a number of setups with the reenactors around that theme. I also had to use myself in these photographs. I quickly realized that I was this walking, talking, combustible mix of sex and guns for these guys. There was a little black-and-white photograph of me with an AK-47 that was a hot commodity. Newcomers were intimidated that I was the Viêt Công female fighter and glanced at me sideways. The more aggressive ones would sidle up and mutter under their breath, “You are so hot.” MR’s “Imitation of Life” says that disguise uncovers more than it covers. Here, there was nowhere to hide, even behind the camera. Role playing forced me to consider the multiplicity of perspectives. You can be the enemy but also the victim, the aggressor but also the defender. I felt that I could be a Saigon bar girl, the object of desire. At the same time, I was a menace in black pajamas cinched at the waist by a web belt full of hand grenades. It was a messy, confusing, and subversive paradigm that has stayed with me.

In Men and Apparitions, your protagonist, Zeke, studies vernacular photography where authorship is not an urgent issue. Do you think something would be amiss if he had been researching art photographers’ photographs of families instead?

LT: I never thought of doing it that way. It’s interesting, An-My. What would the problems have been? But he’s an ethnographer so he wouldn’t have gone that way, I think. I wanted to focus on vernacular images as part of the family drama, how they see themselves, what they want to remember. It’s an aspect of family life or was; it’s changed with the iPhone—so many millions taken, then deleted. The lack of authorship, in all ways they are anonymous to anyone but them and their families, and in the novel, when Zeke comes upon two bags of family photographs in a junk store, for sale, he finds that very disturbing. He feels the family itself had been thrown away or abandoned.

AML: It is so poignant that Zeke thinks he can pathologize these families but at the same time we get the opportunity to study him and his behavior and play pop psychologist. Do you think the drive to be right is dangerous?