Product Details
Hardcover
96 pages
J&L Books; Illustrate edition
Published 2006
Product Description
In June, 2005 I was in Vietnam for a month as part of an international artists retreat. While I was there I visited The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, which is a memorial museum for what is referred to in Vietnam as The American War. I was so affected by what I saw at the museum that I went back several times and eventually photographed all of the images and text descriptions from the main museum over two hundred photos. I used my digital camera and took the shots hand held at off angles to avoid reflections. The images have an oddly casual quality but are still accurate representations of the material depicted at the museum with a similarly horrifying quality. I decided to print the photographs and exhibit them at various venues around the U.S. as a sort of re-presentation of the material I encountered in Vietnam. The photographs in this book are a selection of about half of all the pictures in the museums main exhibition hall. Even though many of the images were familiar to me, seeing them all together and presented from the Vietnamese perspective was very striking. It made me realize that I didnt know much about the details of the war that had consumed the U.S. for most of my early childhood. I started researching the war in an attempt to understand why it happened and what its effects were on the region and on U.S. policy. The museum and my re-presentations of it are only showing one perspective, there are many others. I encourage everyone to do their own research and find out more about The American War in Vietnam and all of the other American Wars that have been happening ever since. Harrell Fletcher
About the Author
Harrell Fletcher is a visual artist working in mixed media: video, installation, photography and web based works. His work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Bienniale. Fletcher has an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and has taught and lectured in the US and Europe . In Spring 2004, he taught at New York's Cooper Union. A hallmark of his work is to devise strategies for transforming the everyday experiences and objects of community residents into curated exhibitions. |
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