How can war trauma be imagined in the scope of the universe and its myriad galaxies? Can historical pain be measured in the stars? The work of An-My Lê suggests a trajectory from this most intimate of human experience to the ineffable mystery and grandeur of the heavens over a diverse practice of more than 30 years.

Lê uses a large-format wooden Deardorff field camera to interrogate traces of war on the landscape and the human psyche. Born in Saigon in 1960, the artist and her family were evacuated by the American government when Lê was 15 years old. She returned to her motherland in 1994, when the US lifted its trade embargo on the country, beginning her first major photographic series Vietnam, which she developed over four years until 1998.

The images in Vietnam are conceptually broad, though unified by a lyric remove from their subject matter. Only one picture might loosely be called a portrait, Untitled, Nam Ha (1994), in which a girl on the edge of adolescence gazes out of the frame as if unaware of being photographed (although it is worth noting that the relatively long exposure required for the archaic camera would have required her to pose). Three incongruous aspects of the girl’s clothing render this deceptively simple picture an enigma: a brimmed hat that suggests military attire more than farmwork, a string of glass or crystal beads, and a dark stain on the front of her shirt—it is hard not to think of blood.