An-My Lê and Uta Barth receive MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants

Congratulations to An-My Lê and Uta Barth, MacArthur Fellowship recipients.
black and white photograph

Night Operations, 2003–04 © An-My Lê

Congratulations to photographers An-My Lê and Uta Barth, who have received MacArthur Foundation Fellowships!

Lê and Barth are among twenty-one other recipients of the award, commonly known as the “genius” grant—a group that includes scientists, economists, writers, musicians, a stringed-instrument-bow maker, and others at the top of their fields, who will each receive $500,000 over the next five years.

Lê was born in Vietnam in 1960 and came to the United States in 1975 as a political refugee. In the 1990s, she returned to Vietnam to photograph its landscape, and in 1999 began documenting a group of Vietnam War reenactors in North Carolina and their elaborate re-staging of battles, training, and daily life for American and Viet Cong soldiers. Lê also photographed the U.S. military’s training exercises in preparation for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These series came together in Lê’s 2005 Aperture monograph Small Wars.

The German-born photographer Uta Barth has published numerous monographs, including white blind (bright red), In Between Places, and nowhere near, which often experiment with depth of field and focus to explore the nature of perception and vision. Barth is currently a professor of art emeritus at the University of California, Riverside.

A limited-edition print of An-My Lê’s Night Operations, 2003–4 is available for purchase in our store.