Lê was born in Saigon and immigrated to the United States as a political refugee in 1975. For her most recent series of photographs, she traveled the world with the armed forces, examining the "soft power" that the United States wields in the form of humanitarian missions and relief efforts. This five-part work plays incisively with the viewer's own expectations: at first one tries to read the picture as an unbroken chain of images simulating a widescreen view from a fixed point-an almost genetically coded way in which Westerners see the world unfold from the panorama entertainments of the nineteenth century to the virtual reality of the online game World of Warcraft. The assumed stability breaks down, however, at the moment the brain catches up with the eye to realize that it is we who are unmoored and adrift, not the world cycling by like slides through a Viewmaster—a reversal of perspective in America's relation to the world at the level of individual perception.
