An-My Lê, Monument, General P.G.T. Beauregard, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2016

Narrator: An-My Lê developed the series this work comes from, The Silent General, between 2015 and 2017.

An-My Lê: There's something about working with history in the present time that ended up being so attractive to me. 

All of the monuments were being asked to be taken down and there was a huge controversy, so I started photographing those monuments because they are such an incredible reminder of the history but also perhaps there was something about history repeating itself, or something about progress not quite being progress. So this looping around of past, present, and future was interesting. And I think as the elections became more complicated and we all got anxious about trying to make sense of what people were telling us, I gained a kind of urgency. I went back down to New Orleans around election times and made a lot of photographs then.