Saturday University: Photography and the Afterlife of the War in Vietnam

Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season.

Ceaseless Replay: Photography and the Afterlife of the War in Vietnam
Thy Phu

More than a half-century after the end of the Vietnam War, its images continue to circulate—restaged, reimagined, and reinterpreted. From museum exhibitions to battlefield reenactments, the war’s visual legacy remains unsettled.

This talk explores how photography serves not only as a record of conflict, but as a powerful medium for performing memory. Focusing on An-My Lê’s Small Wars—a series of large-format black-and-white photographs taken at Vietnam War reenactments in the American South—it considers how artists respond to the lingering specters of war, and how images allow us to confront what may no longer be visible but is still deeply felt.

Lê, herself a refugee from Vietnam, does not remain outside these scenes. Instead, she steps into the frame—sometimes as a distant observer, sometimes dressed in the black pajamas of a guerrilla fighter. Her images do not reproduce the spectacle of war; rather, they evoke its quiet repetitions and enduring claims on memory, identity, and belonging. In dialogue with Lê’s work, the talk also considers Vietnam in Flames, a rare 1969 photo-book by ARVN officer Nguyễn Ngoc Hanh. Often dismissed for its staged imagery, this volume remains a touchstone for diasporic Vietnamese communities whose experiences are seldom reflected in official archives. It reminds us that reenactment is not necessarily deception, but can serve as mourning, resistance, and a way to lay claim to the war’s visual record. These photographic practices remind us that the aftermath of war is not only written in history books, but etched in images—sometimes staged, sometimes salvaged—that continue to matter for those who lived through it, and for those of us still learning how to see.

Thy Phu is a scholar whose research explores how photography and visual culture shape understandings of migration and Asian North American diasporic communities. She is a professor at the University of Toronto and co-director of Refugee States, a collaborative project working with refugee communities to create digital storytelling archives that challenge dominant narratives about displacement. She has also been involved in curatorial and public humanities projects that engage with photography and archival materials to deepen conversations about war and personal memory. She has written and co-edited five books, including Warring Visions: Vietnam and Photography and Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture. Through her work, she invites audiences to reconsider how images influence collective memory and cultural identity.

Tickets
$15 public
$10 SAM members & students with ID
Tickets include gallery access