Shoshana Wayne Gallery
Paris Photo 2016

WTC From Four Perspectives, 2016 are four digitally stretched photographs of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attack in New York City. The four images are photographs of a particular moment from different perspectives/corners of the city looking in. By stretching the images to a length of 50 meters, Lê abstracts the scene and creates a scroll-like landscape that is experienced much like traditional scroll paintings, one section at a time. By stretching and abstracting the images, Lê is denying the viewer easy access to an already popularized and iconic image, but once the viewer knows the image source he or she is asked to recall. The artist asks us to think about the images in time, to travel through a landscape. The fact that the viewer only sees a limited part of an image that has been abstracted is exactly the point—the story behind each image is far more complex, layered, and inter-woven than the eye can see.