Events Ashore
Shot in coastal waters and regions from Iraq to Antarctica, Events
Ashore examines intersecting themes of scientific exploration, military
power, environmental crises, fantasies of empire and the vast
ungovernable oceans that connect nations and continents. In a continuing
practice that explores photography's ability to describe natural forces
and geography as backdrops against which human ambitions are weighed and
scrutinized, Lê turns toward the seascape as both a historical tradition
in visual art and as the site of a wide range of contemporary issues and
anxieties.
"Landscape is truth" muses a highly trained ex-soldier in Don
Delillo's Running Dog (1978). Lê's various terrains are rife with
physical obstacles and incontrovertible political realities. The
photographs offer a complication of truths, both human and epic in
scale: a soldier stands watch over oil platforms off the coast of Iraq
scanning the North Arabian sea for potential threats. In Antarctica, the
only continent never to have hosted a war, a group of recently deposited
scientists look on as Oden, a Norwegian icebreaker makes a slow
departure and in Australia an exhausted unit of U.S. Marines pauses to
witness dusk in an emerald forest. While echoing traditions ranging
from 19th century romantic painting to contemporary social landscape
photography, Lê makes dynamic speculations on our capacity to occupy
spaces as we attempt to control the potentially uncontrollable while
pondering the infinite.
Produced between 2005 and 2008, the photographs in Events Ashore
were made during visits to Australia, Antarctica, Japan, Antarctica,
Kuwait, Iraq and California.
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