Close-Up on War: The Story of Pioneering Photojournalist Catherine Leroy in Vietnam
by Mary Cronk Farrell (Author)
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Booktalk: French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war’s few woman photographers, documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year Vietnam War. Although she had no formal photographic training and had never traveled more than a few hundred miles from Paris before, Leroy left home at age 21 to travel to Vietnam and document the faces of war. Despite being told that women didn’t belong in a “man’s world,” she was cool under fire, gravitated toward the thickest battles, went along on the soldiers’ slogs through the heat and mud of the jungle, crawled through rice paddies, and became the only official photojournalist to parachute into combat with American soldiers. Leroy took striking photos that gave America no choice but to look at the realities of war–showing what it did to people on both sides–from wounded soldiers to civilian casualties.
Snippet: Her parents and friends did not understand her desire to leave home, travel across the globe, and drop herself into danger. For Catherine, it was simple.
“I want to become a photojournalist, and the biggest story at the moment is the Vietnam War.”
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