Catherine Leroy was a French-born photographer and photojournalist who captured the Vietnam War through stark photographs.
Table of Contents
- 1 Early life
- 2 Career
- 2.1 Close-Up on War: The Story of Pioneering Photojournalist Catherine Leroy in Vietnam
- 2.2 Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam
- 2.3 Grammaire d'usage de l'espagnol contemporain (HU Langues et civilisation anciennes espagnoles) (French Edition)
- 2.4 God Cried
- 2.5 Autisme : l'accès aux apprentissages: Pour une pédagogie du lien (Enfances) (French Edition)
- 2.6 Métiers de la mode 1re, Tle Bac Pro MM-V (2019) - Pochette élève: Pratiques professionnelles (2019) (Bac pro industriels: Pratiques professionnelles) (French Edition)
- 2.7 The Key to the Killer
- 2.8 Music of Leroy Anderson
- 2.9 You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
- 2.10 The Libertine [Blu-ray]
Early life
Leroy was born in the suburbs of Paris on August 27, 1944. She attended a Catholic boarding school and, to impress her boyfriend, earned a parachutist’s license at the age of 18. After being moved by images of war she had seen in Paris Match, she decided to travel to South Vietnam to “give war a human face.” At the age of 21 she booked a one-way ticket to Laos in 1966, with just one Leica M2 and $200 in her pocket.
Career
Upon her arrival in Saigon in 1966, Leroy met the photographer Horst Faas, bureau chief of the Associated Press. She was the first journalist to be accredited to parachute jump in combat, and she joined the 173rd Airborne Brigade at Operation Junction City a year later. She was so small and thin that she had to be weighed down so as not to be blown away during the jump. She had her press credentials temporarily suspended after she swore at a Marine officer who she felt was condescending in denying her request to jump shortly after Operation Junction City.
During the battle for Hill 881 on 30 April 1967 she took a series of photos of U.S. Navy Corpsman Vernon Wike tending to a dying Marine which were published in Life to critical acclaim. One of three photos taken quickly. The pictures show Wilke in tall grass, cradling the Marine wounded in battle. Wike is seen in the first frame holding two of his hands against the chest of the Marine to try and stop the bleeding. The second frame shows him trying to locate a heartbeat. In the third frame, “Corpsman In Anguish”, he has just realised the man is dead.
While photographing Operation Hickory, a Marine unit was near the Vietnamese Demilitarized Area when she was struck by mortar fire from the People’s Army of Vietnam. Leroy would later credit a camera with saving her life by stopping some of the shrapnel. She was evacuated first to Con Thien, then to the USS Sanctuary, where she was visited by III Marine Amphibious Force commander General Lew Walt. She was then transferred to a hospital in Danang and discharged in mid-June.
In September 1967 she photographed the siege of Con Thien. In October 1967 she visited her family in Paris and flew back via New York where she signed a contract with the Black Star photo agency.:110-1
During the 1968 Tet Offensive Leroy and Francois Mazure, Agence France Presse journalist, were captured by PAVN soldiers at the Battle of Hue. She managed to talk her way out and emerged as the first newsperson to take photographs of PAVN soldiers behind their own lines. The subsequent story made the cover of Life.
She was the first female freelancer to be awarded the George Polk Award in 1968 by the Overseas Press Club. At the awards ceremony in early April in New York she used her acceptance speech to berate the Associated Press which she accused of losing her negatives, which spoiled her relationship with AP and Horst Faas.:123-5 Returning to South Vietnam in May she struggled to regain her momentum, losing the drive for fieldwork:
Her last major Vietnam photo essay This is That War was published in Look magazine on 14 May 1968 in the same issue where the editors changed policy to denounce the war.:126-7
Leroy returned to Paris from South Vietnam in mid December 1968. In August 1969 she accepted an assignment from Look to cover the Woodstock festival but on the first day decided to join the crowd and spent the subsequent months travelling and doing drugs with Vietnam veterans she had met there.:130-1
Frank Cavestani and she began filming Operations Last Patrol in August 1972. This film is about Ron Kovic, the anti-war Vietnam vets and their protests at Miami Beach’s 1972 Republican National Convention. The film inspired Kovic to write his autobiography Born on the Fourth of July.:210-1
In mid-April 1975, she returned to Saigon to report on the Fall of Saigon. On 30 April she and Francoise Demulder photographed the PAVN entering the city, with Demulder taking the iconic photo of a tank crashing through the gate of the Independence Palace.:236-7
She began a relationship in 1976 with Bernard Estrade, Agence France Presse reporter. Estrade was sent to Hanoi, and Leroy spent two years traveling around the country in 1980 photographing the fifth anniversary. From 1977 to 1986 she covered conflicts in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Libya for Time stopping war photography in the early 1990s.:240
Leroy originally sold her work to United Press International and the Associated Press, and later worked for Sipa Press and Gamma. In 1972, Leroy co-authored the book God Cried, about the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army during the 1982 Lebanon War.
Last update 2021-08-06