Vietnam, Virginia, California

THREE diverse landscapes -- the rural and urban sweep of Vietnam, a lush Virginia forest, the rocky expanse of a California desert -- are separated by geography and time, but in the work of photographer An-My Le, they share a common theme: war.

In her book “Small Wars” -- the title comes from an American military term for guerrilla warfare -- Le explores war, memory and landscape through the juxtaposition of three series of black-and-white images shot from 1994 to 2004.

The earliest photographs were taken in Vietnam, an effort by the adult Le to reconnect with the homeland she fled at 15 with her family. They left for the United States during the 1975 fall of Saigon.

From 1999 to 2002, Le photographed a Virginia-based group of self-described “living historians” as they reenacted events from the Vietnam War in the woods. To gain access, she participated, playing civilian and enemy characters in their war games.

It was physically rigorous and a psychological strain, she said in a recent phone interview, but it helped her understand “why the Vietnam War is still such a prevalent myth that is so entrenched in American culture.”

In 2003 and 2004, Le turned her lens on the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, a training center for troops bound for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Le, an assistant professor of photography at Bard College in New York, has works in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums. Her photographic method harks back to the 19th century: ground glass plates and a large-format 5-by-7-view camera mounted on a tripod.

“You can’t be spontaneous; it’s very cumbersome,” she said. “But it allows for incredible depth and clarity in the way it describes the space and the landscape, the shapes and lines.”

Landscapes dominate Le’s photographs, emphasizing the comparative fragility and smallness of her human subjects. “I think that’s the way I and a lot of Vietnamese -- and others who have been involved in war -- always felt,” she said.

“Landscape has its specificity in a geological way, but it also holds so much about the history and the culture of a country. I think for anybody in exile it’s connected to the idea of home. You think of the landscape and you think of the food, the air, the smells. It’s all connected to the land.”