An-My Lê’s photographs examine the impacts of war and the violent transformation of natural landscapes into battlefields. Lê and her family fled Vietnam in 1975 during the final year of the Vietnam War and came to the United States as political refugees. In the series Small Wars, she photographed Vietnam War reenactments organized by re-creation societies in Virginia and North Carolina. Although the subjects’ costumes and gear look authentic, the landscape betrays the fiction: the North American pine trees distinguishable on either side of the composition of Rescue (2006.118.1), for example, contrast with the dense tropical jungle that dominates the visual record of the war. Lê used a cumbersome, large-format camera in the tradition of nineteenth-century photographers such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, who had documented the grisly aftermath of U.S. Civil War battles in the forests of Virginia nearly 150 years earlier.