01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, July 13, 2006

The scene is as familiar as it is disturbing.

In the foreground, four men in street clothes carry automatic weapons. Behind them, a cluster of one-story buildings is scrawled with anti-American slogans. One reads "Down USA," another "Free Saddam." Behind the buildings, a dry, rock-strewn landscape stretches toward the horizon.

A surveillance photo of Iraqi insurgents? An outtake from the latest al-Qaida video?

Actually, it's a photograph of 29 Palms, a California military base where American troops are trained in desert-fighting conditions and guerrilla warfare before shipping off to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Rather than real-life insurgents, the men with guns are American soldiers playing the part of Islamic extremists. Likewise, the graffiti-scrawled "terrorist camp" is little more than a carefully contrived stage set.

Welcome to the is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex world of An-My Le, a Vietnam-born photographer whose work is the focus of a thought-provoking exhibit at the RISD Museum. Organized by Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography, the show features two of Le's most recent projects, both of which put a new spin on the old military catch phrase "the theater of war."

For her "Small Wars" series, Le spent three years following a group of Vietnam War reenactors as they tromped around the Virginia woods, dressed in vintage camouflage gear and toting Vietnam-era rifles and machine guns. The results range from bosky landscapes in which Le's weekend Rambos are all but invisible to action-packed battle scenes that look frighteningly real.

The second series, "29 Palms," focuses on the California military base of the same name. Located on the edge of the Mojave Desert, the base is the prime training facility for Marine units headed to the Middle East.

War as theater

Based solely on her choice of subjects, it's tempting to think of Le as the perfect battlefield photographer for our reality-challenged era. And indeed, her pictures raise thorny questions about how we experience the "realities" of war and how these experiences are shaped through photography and other forms of mass media.

After all, what better way to "cover" a war waged over nonexistent W.M.D. than through a series of simulated battle scenes?

Yet what makes Le such an interesting artist -- and what lifts her work above mere agitprop -- is how she manages to raise these questions without stooping to irony or caricature. Indeed, her photographs are notable for the respect and restraint she shows toward her warrior-subjects.

That restraint is especially surprising given Le's background.

She was born in South Vietnam in 1960, and she and her family were among the thousands of refugees who fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975. According to the show's catalog, Le has vivid memories of this period -- memories that continue to fuel her work.

Yet she's also familiar with American popular culture, including movies such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon.

In "Small Wars," her 1999-2002 series about Vietnam War reenactors, Le found a subject that neatly merged her American present and Vietnamese past.

On the one hand, the series dutifully follows a gaggle of camouflage-clad warriors as they pitch camp, send out patrols, rescue a fallen comrade and, in one particularly striking sequence, stage a night attack on an ammunition depot.

On the other hand, there's no mistaking Le's pristine black-and-white prints for actual frontline photographs, just as there's no confusing the Virginia farms and pine forests where most of the action takes place for the jungles of Vietnam. Rather than the theater of war, we get war as theater.

A debt to popular culture

Le's fascination with military role-playing continues, albeit with a few new wrinkles, in her 2003 series "29 Palms."

Unlike the pretend soldiers of "Small Wars," the Marines who train at 29 Palms are headed for actual combat zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. And unlike the earlier series, where rural Virginia did a poor job of standing in for Vietnam, the stark desert landscape of 29 Palms is a perfect geographical match for Iraq, Iran and other Persian Gulf countries.

Paradoxically, the simulated combat at 29 Palms is all the more convincing precisely because the reality of war is so imminent. Several shots, for example, show what appears to be a mock-detention center filled with sullen-looking "prisoners." Another sequence follows a Marine patrol as it scouts, surrounds and ultimately captures a group of soldiers posing as armed militants.

There are also a number of close-ups, including a striking portrait of a young soldier casually holding a pair of automatic pistols. But most of the pictures take a more distant view, showing tanks and soldiers outlined against sweeping desert landscapes.

Besides conveying the sheer scale of the military presence at 29 Palms, these pictures illustrate another aspect of Le's work: her debt to American popular culture, especially movies and photography.

The way Le frames her 21st-century cavalrymen against the dusty plains and hills of the California desert, for example, recalls the work of early western photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan, as well as the great Monument Valley locales favored by film director John Ford.

Meanwhile, many of the pictures from Le's "Small Wars" series echo the work of Civil War-era photographers such as Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

Interestingly, Brady and other early photographers weren't above altering backgrounds and staging mock-battle scenes to get better pictures. In her "Small Wars" and "29 Palms" series, Le simply carries on this proud tradition.

"An-My Le: Small Wars" runs through Oct. 15 at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St. in Providence. Hours: Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. (and until 9 p.m. on Gallery Nights). Admission: adults $8, seniors $5, $3 college students with I.D., ages 5-18 $2, free under 5. Phone: (401) 454-6500. Web: www.risdmuseum.org.

bvansicl@projo.com / (401) 277-7421