An My Lê's Viêt Nam work has been on my bookshelf for a few years, but I keep coming back to it. She was born in Vietnam but was displaced by the war as a child and moved to live in America. Her pictures of the Vietnamese landscape are all about memory and myth. Returning to her homeland to make pictures she sees a mythologised version of Vietnam, implanted into her mind by foggy childhood memories, American news reels and Hollywood movies. She channels that mythology into photographs full of suggestion and connotation - pictures which jump between the present and the past, between fact and fiction. The landscapes are as psychological as they are physical.

I like this work because it's strange and open ended. It dares to step beyond photographic fact and into myth. Sometimes I feel this word, myth, gets misused. A myth isn’t a lie, rather it describes the stories we tell to understand, and come to terms with, the past. The writer and mythologist, Joseph Campbell, describes mythology as a group dream. To me, this is what An My Lê’s work is about. It reminds me of something written by the American writer and veteran of the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien: Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.