Marine Corps Weapons Company (I), Earthquake Relief, Grand Goâve, Haiti, from the series Events Ashore

This work was part of Looking 101, a 2024 exhibition that supported Northwestern University’s undergraduate curriculum with an emphasis on first-year students.The following text was made available in the exhibition via cell phone camera (QR code) and booklet

An-My Lê was a teenager in 1975 when her family was evacuated from Vietnam aboard an American military transport plane. The family settled in California. Over time, photography became Lê’s approach to understanding the Vietnam War or, as she explained, a way to exorcise her experience of it. "My life has been completely affected by American foreign policy," Lê told a journalist. "They were the perpetrators, but they were also the saviors." Lê works with a film camera to compose formal photographs of a complicated subject. For her series Events Ashore, Lê traveled with the United States armed forces over nine years and photographed military installations, training expeditions, and research missions on all seven continents. Her role was that of a careful observer of the manifestations and transactions of power across national identities and contexts. This image is a partially staged photograph showing members of the US Marine Corps posing with their equipment and local residents during relief efforts near the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This was not the first time the US military was present in Haiti; the US invaded and occupied Haiti between 1915 and 1934. Lê explains, "That notion of projecting power, and that idea of coming to help or coming to invade, it’s a very fine line."