My name is Harrell Fletcher and I live in Portland, Oregon. In 2005 I was in Vietnam as part of an international artists residency. And I was interested in learning about the Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnam War. One of the first things I found out was that in Vietnam it's referred to as the American War, which was kind of an eye opener for me. I was referred to a museum in Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon called the War Remnants Museum. So I went there and I was really blown away, really affected by what I saw. There is a primary exhibition of about 100 photographs with didactic text that explains what's going on in them both in English and in Vietnamese. And it goes through the ten year US military involvement there and then the aftermath of that, and uses a combination of probably unapproved reprints of US and other international magazines' and newspapers' photographs. So, photographs from Life magazine that were basically just rephotographed. And then, photographs by Vietnamese documentary photographers as well. I just went through with a low tech digital camera and re-photographed all of the images in the exhibition and all of the text. Other people were photographing the images as well. And actually on the first day that I went there, I remember thinking, why are these people taking photographs of these photos? It seems really strange to me. But then when I went back, I went through and methodically photographed all of them. To get a consistent set of photographs, I actually needed to use my flash. But then if I was to photograph the images straight on, then the flash would sort of obliterate the image. And so I had to take the photographs obliquely from a slight angle. Initially, I was a little concerned about that and was trying to figure out how reduce it. But I think even as I was taking the photographs I realized that there was something interesting about it. That there was both formal elements that were interesting. This little explosion that was occurring in a lot of the photographs where this white spot of flash would occur. And I was also showing a little bit of the context of the museum. There wasn't always cutting off the wall behind it or the frame. By showing that in the final presentation and not trying to edit those out or clean it up so that it looked like the original photograph, that I'm indicating that these are photographs that someone's looking at and that I'm looking at. That became important to me conceptually. The viewer of my project, the American War, is looking at me looking at photographs. The combination of image and text is really important to me. I also thought it was just interesting to look at how the information was being presented. What exactly was the text that the museum was choosing to go along with these images. There's some subjectivity going on, and there's historical errors that occur, and that, to me, is also interesting. The voice of an institution that gets to be an authority. I decided that I would try to get the exhibition to travel. And so from Texas in went to Richmond, Virginia, and then to Massachusetts, and to New York as well as a few other locations. And in each of the places, I would also try to organize a public event for each of the exhibitions in which local people that's in protesters, and immigrants, and historians would come and talk about their experiences. Part of what I was interested in was that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan were going on, and my sense was that somehow we'd forgotten something about what it occurred in Vietnam that allow that to occur. And many of the images where echoing the events going on in the Middle East. So for instance, water boarding was a big issue at that time. And there was an image of US soldiers waterboarding a Vietnamese person in the field. Also because there had been a lot of censorship around images from Iraq and Afghanistan, it seem like this was a way of looking at what was going on there by examining historical documents about a previous war. It was in some ways an activist artwork that allowed me to delve deeply into this concern that I had around what was going on with the military during the Bush administration. So in some ways it was like a personal education project that was being done in a very public way.