Atmospheric opacities: An-My Lê’s fog(s) of war

Over several decades, the Vietnamese artist and photographer An-My Lê (b.1960) has used fog to explore the entanglement of war, landscape and collective memory across global contexts. Moving from the Vietnamese jungle to the Southern California desert, Lê’s work uses different forms of atmospheric opacity – such as mist, dust and smoke – to interrogate how the deferred past and anticipatory future of armed conflict shapes the visible present. This article examines how this ‘fog of war’ is mobilised in Lê’s photography. Although Lê uses forms of environmental occlusion that range from exploding ordinance to tropical rainfall, this article argues that fog is used to challenge the supposed immediacy of traditional war photography. Rather than a ‘window’ onto the suffering of others, Lê uses fog to stage a contemplative encounter with the cultural context of armed conflict that is simultaneously critical and affective.