Catherine Leroy

When she flew into Laos with her Leica in February 1966, at the age of 21, Catherine Leroy was the first non-military photographer to embed with the United States forces in Vietnam since the untimely death of fellow woman photojournalist Dickey Chapelle (1918-1965) in November 1965.

During the three years she spent in Vietnam working freelance, despite objections from her male counterparts, Catherine became an honorary member of the 101st Airborn and was described as a ’pugnacious bundle of energy.’

In 1967 she was gravely wounded in battle near Con Thien and a year later, was taken prisoner during the all-out Têt Offensive by North-Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. Her 16th February 1968 cover story in Life magazine, ‘The enemy lets me take his picture’, was the record of her time with the Viet Cong in Huế.

She became more cautious after that, but her courage and empathetic vision to show soldiers and civilians alike was undiminished. She didn’t shy away from showing the brutality of battle, bombings, and interrogation, but didn’t intrude on the privacy of the dying. She produced raw, powerful pictures of daily life and the trauma and collateral damage of war, which were published by the Time, LIFE and LOOK magazines.

Catherine was the first woman to win America’s prestigious George Polk Award in the ‘news photography’ category, which honours “intrepid journalism”, for her April 1967 coverage of the Battle of Hill 881 during the Vietnam War. Her most famous photo portrays the anguish of a young Marine, hunched over the body of his friend on a lifeless charred hill. Catherine said this photo “summed up for me my 15 months of war — I understood then what I was in Vietnam for.”

Her 1972 documentary ‘Operation Last Patrol’ followed the journey of Vietnam Vets from LA to Miami to challenge President Nixon’s Vietnam policy. She went on to cover the Lebanon War and was the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club of America for her coverage of the street fighting in Lebanon in 1976 for Gamma for Time. Her book ‘God Cried’ (1982) with Newsweek journalist Tony Clifton told the heartbreaking story of the Siege of West Beirut.

The collaborative work of contemporary women combat photographers like Anja Niedringhaus (1965-2014) and Susan Meiselas (1948-) can be said to be informed by her work.

In 2005 Paris-Match sent her to Arizona for a reunion with GI Vernon Wike (the subject of her 1967 George Polk Award winning series she had last met in 1983) in what would be her final photo assignment. She died in relative obscurity and poverty, of cancer, in Los Angeles at the age of 60.

The Catherine Leroy Fund was created by her mother in 2011 and holds the archive of Catherine’s work. The ICP New York also holds many of her photographs.