At various times the US military has utilized vast areas of land to simulate the conditions and landscapes of other countries. Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, An-My Lê's photographs have documented the Marine’s “virtual Iraq and Afghanistan”, spread across hundreds of miles of California desert at 29 Palms. Shot with a large format camera, the richly detailed, black-and-white images recall 19^th century war photographs - Roger Fenton’s troops camped in Crimea, Matthew Brady’s dead soldiers on the Civil War battlefield – which, due to the slow film speeds and heavy cameras of the time, were always depictions of before or after the action of battle. With the introduction of smaller, faster cameras, and a more contemporary hunger for gory details, action became the benchmark of good war photography - Capa, Burrows, Nachtway, etc. - while the clarity and, in Stephen Shore’s words, “heightened state of consciousness” of view camera images left the battlefields for other, more benign, landscapes. Outside of the dichotomy of the staged versus documentary in contemporary photography, Lê’s rendering of simulated desert battlefields evoke both the reality of soldiering in the conditions of a given terrain as well as the familiar narratives that have become such a part of our cultural imagination; from the sweep of the epic war picture - Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day - to the current vogue for realism in our depiction of cinematic war - Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down. As photographs, the landscapes bear the weight of both tactical scrutiny and a provocative disjunction. Far from the CNN news-feed, she has confronted the individuals and surfaces that constitute the face of our military culture.