In her compact, tidy Brooklyn studio, Ms. Le, thoughtful and forthright, said she was drawn to Whitman’s reminiscences because they are journalistic yet lyrical, attentive to the landscape, brimming with human sympathy that transcends political schism and, not least, autobiographical. All are impulses she shares.

Born in Saigon in 1960, the artist left for Paris after the 1968 Tet offensive with her mother — who had a scholarship at the Sorbonne — and two brothers. They returned after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. But their absence didn’t spare Ms. Le intimate exposure at an early age to devastating nightly bombardment, nor to intractable social conflict.

The American crusade against Communism was of course also a civil war, and Ms. Le’s Francophile family reflected its divisions. She, her Buddhist father and her brothers were evacuated by the Americans in 1975. Her Roman Catholic mother followed several anxious months later; she’d been one of the last evacuees, lifted by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy.

All wound up in Southern California and thrived there. Ms. Le completed graduate programs in biology at Stanford and was headed for medical school when she took a single, fateful course in photography. By 1986 she’d been hired, in Paris, as staff photographer for a guild dating to the Middle Ages that was once responsible for building churches and chateaus, and now tends to their restoration and documentation. Ms. Le embarked with them on a four-year tour of France — not for the last time, she was the only woman in the group — teaching herself to use a view camera and learning “about things that are well made.”