Photographer Focus #5: Catherine Leroy

As I was writing this series that is unintentionally turning into a “women photographing war” series, I’ve been thinking about Catherine Leroy. She’s a French photographer I heard about a very long time ago when I was a kid, and I was vaguely aware of her career. Mainly because she worked for Paris Match, a weekly news magazine that can be seen as a more trivial French Life Magazine. She arrived in Saigon in 1966. she was twenty-one years old. She had bought a one-way ticket from Paris, with no intention of coming back any time soon. A hundred and fifty dollars in her pocket, a Leica M2, and three words of English. She went straight to the Associated Press office and asked for a job. Dickey Chapelle‘s photograph was on the wall. Chapelle had been the first American woman war correspondent killed in action, in Vietnam the year before, on patrol with the Marines. Her picture hung there like a question and a warning: are you sure about this? Leroy was sure. Catherine Leroy in Viet-Nam…