Photographer Focus #1: Dickey Chapelle

I’m into deep dives at the moment and I think I’ll make this a regular feature. I first came across Dickey Chapelle by accident. I was reading about war photographers, having arrived on the subject via Lee Miller. Someone mentioned a woman who wore pearl earrings into combat and whose last photo was recovered from her camera after she was killed. I had to find out who she was. Dickey Chapelle The image people usually show is her standing next to some Marines in Vietnam, wearing her signature Australian bush hat and those huge Harlequin glasses. She looks like someone’s aunt who showed up at the wrong party, but she was exactly where she meant to be. Her real name was Georgette Louise Meyer. She grew up in Milwaukee and taught herself photography as a teenager. By sixteen she was valedictorian of her high school and had a full scholarship to MIT for aeronautical engineering. She was one of only very few women in her class (three to seven depending on sources). But she flunked out…