Catherine Leroy | |
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| Born | August 27, 1944 Paris, France |
| Died | July 8, 2006 (aged 61) |
| Website | dotationcatherineleroy |
Catherine Leroy (August 27, 1944 - July 8, 2006) was a French-born photojournalist and war photographer, whose stark images of battle illustrated the story of the Vietnam War in the pages of Life magazine and other publications. [1]
Leroy was born in the suburbs of Paris on August 27, 1944. [2] She attended a Catholic boarding school and, to impress her boyfriend, earned a parachutist's license at the age of 18. [3] 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. [4] [5]
Upon her arrival in Saigon in 1966, Leroy met the photographer Horst Faas, bureau chief of the Associated Press. A year later she became the first accredited journalist to participate in a combat parachute jump on 23 February 1967, joining the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Operation Junction City. [5] She was so small and thin that she had to be weighed down so as not to be blown away during the jump. [6] 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. [3]
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. [7] was one of three taken in quick succession. In the pictures Wilke is crouched in tall grass cradling a Marine who has been shot while smoke from the battle rises into the air behind them. In the first frame Wike has two hands on the Marine's chest, trying to staunch the wound. In the second, he is trying to find a heartbeat. In the third frame, "Corpsman In Anguish", he has just realised the man is dead. [4]
On 19 May 1967, while photographing Operation Hickory with a Marine unit near the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone, she was severely injured by People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) mortar fire. [8] Leroy would later credit a camera with saving her life by stopping some of the shrapnel. [3] 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. [9] [10] : 95–7
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. [10] : 110–1
In 1968, during the Tet Offensive, Leroy and Agence France-Presse journalist Francois Mazure were captured by PAVN soldiers during the Battle of Huế. 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. [11]
In early 1968 she was awarded the George Polk Award by the Overseas Press Club for her photos on Hill 881, becoming the first freelancer and first woman to win the award. 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. [10] : 123–5 Returning to South Vietnam in May she struggled to regain her momentum, losing the drive for fieldwork:
When you look at war photographs, it's a silent moment of eternity. But for me, it is haunted by sound, a deafening sound. In Vietnam, most of the time it was extremely boring. Exhausting and boring. You walked for miles through rice paddies or jungle -- walking, crawling, in the most unbearable circumstances. And nothing was happening. And then suddenly all hell would break loose.
— Catherine Leroy, "A window on the war", Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2002 [3]
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. [10] : 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. [10] : 130–1
In August 1972 she and Frank Cavestani began filming Operation Last Patrol, a film about Ron Kovic and the anti-war Vietnam veterans and their protests at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. The film inspired Kovic to write his autobiography Born on the Fourth of July . [10] : 210–1
She returned to Saigon in mid-April 1975 not as a reporter, but to witness the Fall of Saigon. On 30 April she and Françoise Demulder photographed the PAVN entering the city, with Demulder taking the iconic photo of a tank crashing through the gate of the Independence Palace. [10] : 236–7
While covering the Lebanese Civil War in 1976 she began a relationship with Agence France-Presse reporter Bernard Estrade. Estrade was posted to Hanoi and in 1980 Leroy spent two months travelling around the country photographing for the fifth anniversary of the end of the war. 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. [10] : 240
Leroy originally sold her work to United Press International and the Associated Press, [5] 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. [4]
She lived in the Hotel Chelsea in the late 1980s. [12] Later in life, she founded and ran a vintage clothing store, Piece Unique, with a website. [13] Piece Unique also hosted an online gallery of images from the Vietnam War, entitled "Under Fire: Images From Vietnam". [3]
In 2005 Paris-Match sent her to Arizona for a reunion with Vernon Wike in what would be her last photo assignment. [10] : 241 [14]
She died in Santa Monica, California, one week after being diagnosed with lung cancer. [10] : 241
Leroy won numerous awards for her work, including in 1967 the George Polk Awards, Picture of the Year, The Sigma Delta Chi, and The Art Director's Club of New York. She was the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award – "best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise" – for her coverage of the civil war in Lebanon, in 1976. [15] In 1997, she was the recipient of an Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri.
The Viet Cong was an epithet and umbrella term to call the communist-driven armed movement and united front organization in South Vietnam. Formally organized as and led by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and nominally conducted military operations under the name of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (LASV), the movement fought under the direction of North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and United States governments during the Vietnam War. The organization had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized and mobilized peasants in the territory the Viet Cong controlled. During the war, communist fighters and some anti-war activists claimed that the Viet Cong was an insurgency indigenous to the South that represented the legitimate rights of people in South Vietnam, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of North Vietnam. It was later conceded by the modern Vietnamese communist leadership that the movement was actually under the North Vietnamese political and military leadership, aiming to unify Vietnam under a single banner.
Graham Anderson Martin was an American diplomat. He was the ambassador to Thailand and as U.S. representative to SEATO from 1963 to 1967, ambassador to Italy from 1969 to 1973 and the last United States Ambassador to South Vietnam from 1973 until his evacuation during the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
Marc Riboud was a French photographer, best known for his extensive reports on the Far East: The Three Banners of China, Face of North Vietnam, Visions of China, and In China.
The Tet Offensive was a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) launched a surprise attack on 30 January 1968 against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the United States Armed Forces and their allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. The name is the truncated version of the Lunar New Year festival name in Vietnamese, Tết Nguyên Đán, with the offense chosen during a holiday period as most ARVN personnel were on leave. The purpose of the wide-scale offensive by the Hanoi Politburo was to trigger political instability in a belief that mass armed assault on urban centers would trigger defections and rebellions.
Phan Thị Kim Phúc, referred to informally as the girl in the picture and the napalm girl, is a South Vietnamese-born Canadian woman best known as the nine-year-old child depicted in the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, titled "The Terror of War", taken at Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972.
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The year 1968 saw major developments in the Vietnam War. The military operations started with an attack on a US base by the North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong (VC) on January 1, ending a truce declared by the Pope and agreed upon by all sides. At the end of January, the PAVN and VC launched the Tet Offensive.
At the beginning of 1967 the United States was engaged in a steadily expanding air and ground war in Southeast Asia. Since its inception in February 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, had escalated in the number and significance of its targets, inflicting major damage on transportation networks industry, and petroleum refining and storage facilities. Yet the campaign showed no signs of achieving either of its stated objectives. The air attacks had not broken the Hanoi government's will to continue the war, and they had not halted or appreciably hindered the flow of People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops and supplies into South Vietnam. North Vietnam had been able to repair damage and develop substitutes for destroyed facilities rapidly enough to counter the incremental escalation of the U.S. air campaign. With Soviet and Chinese assistance, the North Vietnamese had built a large and sophisticated air defense system. Its guns and missiles extracted a toll in pilots and aircraft for every American raid. On the ground in South Vietnam, the U.S. force buildup, begun in late 1965, was approaching completion. More than 380,000 American troops were in the country, alongside over 730,000 Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers and some 52,000 soldiers from other allied nations. After a year of base building and intensifying combat, the U.S. commander, General William Westmoreland, believed that his forces were ready for major offensives that would seize the battlefield initiative from the PAVN and Viet Cong (VC). The PAVN/VC, however, had been conducting their own buildup, including the infiltration into South Vietnam of regular PAVN divisions. These units, along with VC guerrillas and light infantry formations, were countering the American challenge. Within South Vietnam, the PAVN/VC sought opportunities to inflict American casualties in large and small engagements. They also concentrated troops at various points on South Vietnam's borders to create a strategic threat to the allies and compel the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, (MACV) to disperse its reserves.
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