Aperture is pleased to release this very special limited-edition print by An-My Lê, accompanied by a signed copy of the artist's new survey, On Contested Terrain. All proceeds from the sale of the limited-edition set support the publication of this important and timely volume of work.

Taken for the series Silent General, this previously unpublished image is tranquil on the surface, yet in the context of the series, poetically alludes to the political polarization of the landscape along the border of Mexico and the United States. The series Silent General takes its title from Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (1882), an autobiographical recounting of his time spent tending to wounded Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Whitman had great empathy for both sides, writing, “I staid to-night a long time by the bedside of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, aged about 19 years . . . As I was lingering, soothing him in his pain, he says to me suddenly, ‘I hardly think you know who I am—I don’t wish to impose upon you—I am a rebel soldier.’ I said I did not know that, but it made no difference. . . . In an adjoining ward I found his brother, an officer of rank, a Union soldier, a brave and religious man . . . It was in the same battle both were hit. One was a strong Unionist, the other Secesh; both fought on their respective sides, both badly wounded, and both brought together here after a separation of four years. Each died for his cause.” Lê made her first photographs for this series in New Orleans, when Confederate statues started coming down in 2015. Since then, she has gathered different, sometimes conflicting viewpoints on a twenty-first-century cross-country road trip. Lê’s designation of “Fragments” within this series is an homage to the literary structure of Specimen Days and a poetic way of sequencing the pictures.

An-My Lê’s (born in Saigon, South Vietnam, 1960) work has been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lê has received many awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation. She is a professor in the Department of Photography at Bard College.

Courtesy of Aperture Foundation