Alison Hokanson, Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Met
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met
An-My Lê, artist
Lisa Switkin, Partner, Field Operations
Moderated by Ulrich Baer, University Professor, Comparative Literature, German, English, Photography and Imaging, NYU

Join a range of experts, including exhibition curators, a renowned artist, and an award-winning landscape architect, to consider our ongoing and changing relationship with the natural world, how artists capture this unique dynamic, and how we consider timely issues in an evolving natural environment. Reflect on the work of Caspar David Friedrich, who reimagined European landscape painting by portraying nature as a setting for profound spiritual and emotional encounters.

Internationally renowned photographer An-My Lê seeks “to photograph the landscape in such a way that it suggests a universal history, a personal history, a history of culture.” In this lecture, Lê presents two new series of recent photographs, Dark Star and Grey Wolf, continuing her exploration of the contradictory nature of the manifest and the sublime within the contemporary American landscape, and the latter as a present-day locus of technology, power and ambition. In Lê’s work, scale is both temporal and historical, encompassing themes of displacement, war, memory, and resilience. These are present in her earliest black and white pictures of Vietnam (1994-1998) in which she returned to a scarred homeland as a political refugee, to her pictures of war re-enactors in the southern U.S. (Small Wars, 1999-2002),  to staged military training exercises in the American desert (29 Palms, 2003-04), to her more recent lens on polarization in the United States through a series of historical fragments (Silent General, 2015 to today). With extraordinary consideration of history and culture, Lê’s view of her subjects often incorporates an elevated perspective to achieve its signature precision and ethical neutrality. In zooming out to look closer, her stepped-back “proscenium framing” brings into crystal clear vision her observations and stories, not unlike layers of a history painting.