We Remember, You Remember, They Remember: Examining the Methodologies of An-My Lê and Susan Meiselas

By Ting Teal

 The practice of wartime photography has long been regarded as the conduit between the battlefield and the “outsider,” with the latter often determined by boundaries such as nationality, geography or temporality. In this context, the photograph acts as an index of large unseen events that feel inherently embedded with truth; the more disseminated an image is, the more deeply entrenched a communal memory can become despite the actual event not having been largely witnessed firsthand. The significance of photography-as-evidence influencing the production of historical memory cannot be overstated, as Aleida Assmann writes: “Historical research draws on memory for determining importance and value, while memory draws on historical research for verification and correction.”[1] Within that symbiotic influence lies the critical slippage that this paper focuses on: where individual experience, communal memory and decontextualized images collide off-course to reveal new intersectional truths that reassess history as we know it. My paper aims to explain An-My Lê and Susan Meiselas’s respective practices as contrasting examples of interrogating historical trauma and its memory through photography, specifically looking at the images Sleeping Soldiers (Figure 1) and Path (Figure 2) from Lê’s series titled Small Wars, and Molotov Man (Figure 3) and Searching for the National Guard (Figure 4) from Meiselas’s series titled Nicaragua. Both projects contain distinct elements that the artists have fulfilled differently: the artists’ individual positioning within the work, the spatial-temporal zone of the work’s execution, and the creation of an extended cultural relevance for the image long after the shutter has captured the moment. Perhaps the most pervasive shared element between the two artists is the sought-after reconciliation between the past, present and memory, not just within the historical context of the referenced conflict but also within their respective photographic practices. 

It is my goal to form a spectrum centered on truth, evidence and the resulting slippage in between by comparing the artists’ differing strategies. Their respective strategies also illustrate the didactic model within Thierry De Duve’s essay, Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox--a semiotic unpacking of photography as a carrier of time and memory--which will form part of the analytical framework I apply to these images. 

Lê’s Small Wars series are mostly time exposure photographs of the battlefield and its action - there is motion blur, the captured trajectory of moving lights and an overall depth of perspective and tonal values that serve as evidence of a long shutter speed. Both Sleeping Soldiers and Path reference historical examples of wartime photography such as Gustave Le Gray’s Souvenirs du Camp de Châlons - images rooted within the landscape that stretch far beyond into the distance, capturing a moment that feels endless (Figures 5 and 6). Officially commissioned by Napoléon III himself in 1857, Le Gray was charged with documenting a newly inaugurated military camp at Châlons-sur-Marne, which had been established in response to the French army’s performance in the Crimean War.[2] Intended from the beginning as a commemorative gift for the court and some of the men within the pictures, these photos also serve as an official record of France’s dedication towards their military glory and empire. Or in other words, it was propaganda. By employing the qualities that De Duve attributes to the Time Exposure, Le Gray’s photographs operate as “natural evidence”– “It protracts onstage the course of life that goes on outside.” [3]

It is significant that De Duve uses the word “onstage,” an important reference to theatricality and its staging, which underpins the uncertainty of truth as it is perceived in photography. In line with any politically motivated commision, Camp de Châlons documents events that, whilst authentic to some degree in its purposes i.e. training the military, still places its subjects as performers amongst an activated landscape. In reference to early cinema and documentary making as producers of “a modern sense of the event,” Mary Ann Doane writes about the two genres as being tethered to the real through their absolute indexicality, but also producers of an alternative temporality;[4] Le Gray’s camera operates as an optically accurate eye, but is burdened with a responsibility to produce an image that coexists with an officially sanctioned narrative. So what makes his images believable as a truth? Examining these images a hundred and sixty-three years after they were captured, I believe it is the temporal relationship between the contemporary viewer and the awareness of historical technological limitations, which provides the sense of proof that we unconsciously absorb. The performance itself may be self-aware of its artificial staging, but that performance definitely occurred in front of the camera in its entirety. In knowing this, the formal tropes of historical wartime photography (such as Camp de Châlons) begin to function as a set of signs for truth and evidence. When these formal qualities are convincingly present within an image, regardless of the time of its making, it imbues the content with a veneer of truth that we have been conditioned to perceive from its precedents.

These tropes are employed in Lê’s Small Wars, a project that exists between historical events and imagination. By participating in Vietnam War reenactments in North Carolina almost a quarter of a century after the war itself, Lê based her character on a Vietnamese guerilla, whom switches their allegiance between the VietCong and American GIs at will, allowing her to best capture the overall events as an observer.[5] Both Path and Sleeping Soldiers are shot without colour, with a deep depth of field that carries a wide tonal range. There is no dramatic chiaroscuro and (like many of the photos from Châlons) are devoid of action; elegant pauses at odds with the notion of conflict.  At first glance, Path may even seem like a simple benign landscape, lacking in overt content. However, by comparing it to Le Gray’s landscapes, one begins to spot the formal similarities, such as angular planes intersecting along used paths, an expansive sky that meets a horizon, and a scale of the soldiers’ tents that makes them seem like toys. Sleeping Soldiers shows “soldiers” at rest by a tent, no longer miniature in scale, but engulfed by a forest that hides any explicit signs of location or time. Perhaps the only indicators of a modern context are the soldiers’ appearances and the tent’s materiality, but this is muted by the overall effect of the photograph’s grayscale and composition that draw from the conventions of Le Gray’s wartime photography. This parafictional dissonance thwarts the dual nature of a photograph as described by De Duve: its status as a semiotic object, and as a physical sign borne of optical causality. Lê taps into a familiar lexicon of signs that vouches for that photograph’s authenticity, even though its circumstances are not historical fact. And that is not to say her photographs aim to fool the viewer, because in a general sense they follow Le Gray’s situation enough: the performers may have been performative  for the camera, but the performers were undeniably present before it. Her framing of the North Carolina reenactments in the same visual language of wartime photography creates its own alternative reality. In the words of De Duve, the now of this semiotic object (the photograph) “denotes the superficial series as if it were a time, but without any spatial attachment.” Both Path and Sleeping Soldiers contain an autonomous life, a “virtual availability of time in general, a potential ever-present to be drawn at will from the referential past.” [6] The alternate space-time juncture where these images are located creates the conditions for hyper-cathexis, an image surface that effectively acts as a “substitutive object:” the referential past as “frozen time” offers a pause that makes actualization possible. I believe that this pause is present in all photographs, not just in Lê’s images. It is this pause that creates the possibility of mediation and mourning. To define how I am using these terms: as the past and present collides when looking at an photograph, ‘mediation’ is the internal processing of this collision - an expansion of time experienced during this pause that allows the viewer to recognize said collision, which alters the reality and circumstances they are rooted in henceforth as they gaze upon the image surface. An aftereffect of this is ‘mourning,’ a realization of time passed. This mourning period is not necessarily sad, but is an acceptance of the inevitable flow of time.

It is therefore no surprise to read that in Lê’s own words, both the reenactors and the artist participated in the reenactments as an unconventional strategy to “make sense of personal baggage.”[7] In Lê’s case, it was an opportunity to reconcile her childhood memories of wartime Vietnam with her present reality as an Asian-American artist, a life made possible by seeking political refuge in the United States at the age of fifteen.[8]

Lê’s participation also allowed her to both discover and induce feelings about the events being reenacted. She found that they reawakened her memories of night explosions and screams that she had experienced as a child living in Saigon with her parents, both college professors. She recalled the trauma of waking up in the morning to find dead bodies in the streets.[9]

The reenactments created their own unique spatial-temporal zones, much like a dream, within which Lê was able to collide these two disparate periods of her life. It is through this collision, framed by a visual language that signifies truth and evidence, that Lê is able to create a surrogate experience that would otherwise have been impossible, bringing forth a “narrative that meshes the imaginary with the symbolic,” mediating between her personal reality and its overhanging national histories. In Freudian terms, the Vietnam War reenactments provided an otherworldly experience dominated by two historicized partisan positions, a site that prompted Lê’s “memories and expectations” (bound to her intersectional reality of being both Vietnamese and American) to be “brought up and hyper-cathected,” finally allowing her a catharsis that completes her mourning.[10] This slippage between truth and evidence is embedded within the produced images. It is through these conditions, unique to Lê’s biography, that her images are able to puncture through a larger communal memory and reveal  a new intersectional truth and reality.

This relationship functions differently to how Meiselas’s Nicaragua pictures transform over the course of Pictures from a Revolution (1991). A short description of the project: As an American Magnum photographer, Meiselas travelled to Nicaragua to document the Sandinista Insurrection from 1978-1979, with the resulting images published as the eponymous book in 1981. Collaborating with Alfred Guzzetti and Dick Rogers, Meiselas returned to Nicaragua in 1991 in order to track down the subjects within the images, the encounters of which formed the documentary Pictures from a Revolution (1991).[11]

In Meiselas’s case, it is the overbearing collective memory filtered through its individual players that produces a more complicated, but perhaps more truthful reality in its subjectivity. Meiselas’s reconciliation of the project’s twelve year gap, from when the photos were taken to when she returns to Nicaragua, lies less within her status as an implicated individual (compared to Lê), and more within her actions of repatriating the images back to their origin. Whilst it is Lê’s own autobiography that contains the two time periods confronting each other, the past and present examined within Pictures from a Revolution straddles the forming of Nicaragua’s own communal memory: beginning after the Sandinistas’ victory, and just before the images undergo their individual mediation within the 1991 interview subjects. 

Compared to Lê’s positioning within Small Wars, Meiselas’s position as the “outsider” is much more recognizable: as a foreign photographer working in the centre of Nicaragua’s revolution, her snapshots operate as the “live witness” to its events. The work of 1978-1979 follows the tradition of photojournalism faithfully, isolating discrete moments from a chain of events. It is in the 1991 return that Meiselas fractures and exposes the nature of the snapshot as explained by De Duve: “ It freezes onstage the course of life that goes on outside.”[12] From the moment that Meiselas’s camera shutter captured an image, it splits into two branches of temporality: one is of the photo subject’s life that continues on its trajectory, the other is of the singular event that is both “not anymore” and “not yet.” [13] When the snapshot is re-encountered by the photographed subject, a discrepancy between optical record and human memory emerges. In most of the interviews from Pictures from a Revolution, this phenomenon is witnessed (Figure 7, 8).

The snapshot, with its stolen life, carries with it the potential of evolving from an index to a decontextualized symbol over time. It is upon collision with its origin context after a period of time has elapsed, that the slippage between memory, truth and evidence is revealed. An extreme example of this is Molotov Man, a photograph that undergoes a dramatic transformation over the decade after it was taken.

In the years after the insurrection, the photograph of the man with the Molotov became part of a war, a war of images. It was used by the Sandinistas to organize the militia, and then the Contras to organize against them. It was printed on matchbox covers, and stenciled on walls. Like so many photographs that began as documents of history, it ended up as an illustration, and then a symbol. [14]

Once disseminated and therefore independent of the actual Molotov Man, Pablo ‘Bareta’ Arauz (who continues to live their life unseen again until Pictures), the timeline of the image travels parallel to the subject’s and becomes susceptible to being contextually co-opted. In the case of Molotov Man, not only does it become ironically adopted by both sides of Nicaragua’s politics, it even became the subject of a highly public debate on image ownership when it was appropriated by the American painter Joy Garnett. [15] (Figure 9-14)

 The timeline of Molotov Man is unique compared to its companions within the Nicaragua series for its excessive transformation of meaning once separated from its subject, long after the shutter captured it. Another example that diverges from the other encounters within Pictures is the image titled Searching for the National Guard (henceforth referred to as Searching). 

Defenders of the Somoza regime, the documentary delves into the discomfort of asking Nicaraguan civilians if they were not only former National Guardsmen during the revolution, but also if they were the individuals depicted in an image of Guards taken prisoner after Sébaco was taken. 

Meiselas: They told me this was you

Man: No.

Meiselas: It isn’t you? They told me you were held prisoner for a while and then left peacefully.

Man: No, no, no.

Meiselas: What were you doing at the time of the revolution?

Man: I participated in the humanitarian relief with food, supplies. I was working at the time in business with a man here. I was helping him. But I wasn’t involved in this, no.

Meiselas: These were people captured the day after Sébaco was taken. 

Man: But no, I was always working and helping, but I wasn’t… [16]

In the case of this image, both men that Meiselas questioned responded negatively with a vague defense, leaving the image unclaimed within the documentary. The anticipated impact between the image’s singular trajectory and its subject is denied. However, I would argue that this result still yields the result of a new truth (hypothesizing that they are, in fact, the pictured Guardsman): the reconciliation between the two temporal sites is too at odds with the current reality of these two individuals, and an uneasiness – an inability to recognize – emerges as the potential subject gazes at the twelve year old image. The documentary oscillates back and forth between the two faces, leaving it up to the viewer to come to their own conclusions. In comparison to Small Wars, this situation is not so much a slippage between truth and evidence on a larger collective scale, but on a personal one (the photographed individual). 

Meiselas herself ruminates upon this event:

It seems so strange. The one thing photography should be able to do is to identify. And yet I don’t know if these men are the National Guardsmen in that photograph. Time changes so much of what people are, and what things mean. It’s true that photographs stop time, but for people, time doesn’t stop. Maybe photographs tell a kind of truth about the moments they fix, but is it enough of a truth? And for people, who must live in time, is that truth of any consequence? [17]

Significant within a documentary that successfully reunites its many images with their original subjects, Searching raises the question of photography’s limitations in representing truth and evidence, especially when confronted by the highly subjective nature of human memory, that are beyond even the maker’s control.

In deeply examining both artists’ contrasting approaches towards the camera as a codifying device, it is now possible to identify the many key components and positionings at play. 

Taking a step back from photography as medium, these two artists’ projects exemplify how such a universal theme of trauma and time can be distinctly processed through individual methodologies into yielding rejuvenative results, which is ultimately what the viewer walks away with. Within the more specific context of approaching historical trauma as an outsider to it – an area of great interest to me personally as a research-based artist – Lê and Meiselas use collective/historical memory and individual memory as their respective starting points. This is what is being interrogated within the work produced. Lê, in embodying two disparate time periods within her autobiography (the source of her outsider positioning), uses herself as the individual that thwarts the dominating communal/historical perception of the Vietnam War. By leaning into that confrontation, Lê’s Small Wars exists in the No Man’s Land between truth and evidence, the slippage of which becomes utilized as the punctum of the photograph: the viewer departs with a new altered reality that questions the very notion of communal/historical memories. On the other hand, Meiselas’s positioning as an American photojournalist places her more as a facilitator of the phenomenon being interrogated: the subjectivity of individual memory within her subjects. This is additionally complicated by the dominating communal memory that had formed in between when Nicaragua was made and when Meiselas returns in Pictures from a Revolution, creating a scenario where the already-intimidating mediation between past and present could be deemed too treacherous for the individual’s current reality, and subsequently be denied. In this case, the slippage between truth and evidence is the work, it is the phenomenon to be witnessed by the viewer.

Small Wars and Pictures from a Revolution are only two of the many results that can emerge from a pointed and strategic methodology in dealing with historical trauma. Whilst it is up to every artist to figure out for themselves the positioning, order and components of their working methods, it is my hope that by identifying many of the shared elements within these two amazing projects, artists (myself included) can find this rubric useful in considering one’s intentions and methodology for revisiting historical trauma. It is often not a pleasant task, but a necessary one in circumventing injustices and its future repetition.

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to Susan Meiselas and her staff members, Luciana Pinchiero and Jessica Bal, for generously sharing her image files along with her permission. Thank you to Antonella Pelizzari for opening my eyes to photography and for continuously supporting me. Thank you to Danny Berman for his insightful feedback and encouragement; and to the editors of Assemblage, Sigourney Schultz and Shoshi Rosen, for believing in this paper and helping it become its absolute best version.

Footnotes

[1] Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 51.

[2] Sylvie Aubenas, Anne Cartier-Bresson, Gustave Le Gray, 1820-1884 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 131.

[3] Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox” October vol. 5 (Summer, 1978): 113.

[4] Joanna Lowry, “Modern Time: Revisiting the Tableau” in Time and Photography, ed. Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger and Hilde Van Gelder (Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2018), 51.

[5] “An-My Lê: Landscapes of war”, YouTube, uploaded July 9th 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyngT5cdtno

[6] De Duve, “Time Exposure,” 118.

[7] Nancy Princenthal, “Troubled Turf: The Photographs of An-My Lê,” New York Times, last updated April 9 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/arts/design/an-my-le.html

[8] “Small Wars”, Aperture.org, https://aperture.org/shop/small-wars/

[9] Dora Apel, “Historical Reenactment: Romantic Amnesia or Counter-Memory?” in War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 66.

[10] Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 245.

[11] Susan Meiselas, Nicaragua (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2nd Edition 2016).

[12] De Duve, “Time Exposure,” 113.

[12] De Duve, “Time Exposure,” 116.

[14] Transcribed by the author from “Pictures from a Revolution”, Susan Meiselas, Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti (1991).

[15] Susan Meiselas, Joy Garnett, “On the Rights of Molotov Man,” Harper’s, 2007, https://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/on-the-rights-of-molotov-man/

[16] Transcribed by the author from “Pictures from a Revolution.”

[17] Ibid.

Bibliography

Apel, Dora. “Historical Reenactment: Romantic Amnesia or Counter-Memory?” In War Culture and the Contest of Images. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Aperture. “Small Wars” https://aperture.org/shop/small-wars/

Assmann, Aleida. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Munich: Beck, 2006.

Aubenas, Sylvie, and Cartier-Bresson, Anne. Gustave Le Gray, 1820-1884. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002.

De Duve, Thierry. “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox” October vol. 5 (Summer 1978): 113-125. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778649

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-1974. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf

Lowry, Joanna. “Modern Time: Revisiting the Tableau.” In Time and Photography, edited by Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger and Hilde Van Gelder, 47-64. Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2018.

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Meiselas, Susan and Garnett, Joy. “On the Rights of Molotov Man.” Harper’s, 2007. https://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/on-the-rights-of-molotov-man/

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YouTube. “An-My Lê: Landscapes of War” Uploaded July 9th, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyngT5cdtno