Living with Legends

Photojournalist Catherine Leroy has died in Santa Monica, California, following a battle with lung cancer. She was 60. Leroy was best known for her photographs of the Vietnam War.  Her photographs are featured in "Under Fire: Images from Vietnam," which was published earlier this year.  Also known for her fashion sense, in recent years Leroy ran a vintage clothing store in California.

Catherine Leroy arrived in Saigon at 21, armed with a Leica camera and a resolve to capture the human side of the Vietnam War. She crawled through rice paddies while hiding from the fighting, jumped into a combat zone with American paratroopers and was briefly held captive by the North Vietnamese. When she and her cameras were hit by shrapnel, only Leroy survived.  Her stark images — extreme close-ups of the bloody reality of ground combat — accomplished what the daring photojournalist intended: They pulled the viewer into the middle of the conflict. Widely published, the photos brought her a number of honors, including the George Polk Award for news photography in 1967. (Source: LA Times, July 11)

In an April 2005 article in the NY Times, Leroy talked about the current state of war photography:
”We saw 24-hour-a-day Iraq war,” Ms. Leroy said, referring to cable television, ”but we didn’t really see much of anything.” While Americans recall memorable images of Vietnam taken by war photographers, the most memorable images of Iraq — the prisoners of Abu Ghraib — were snapped by soldiers, she said."

Catherine Leroy lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the late 1980s.  Small of stature, she is fondly remember by her friend, Rachel Cohen, as "a tiny bundle of energy." Rachel was kind enough to provide the following photos from her archives.  The two of Catherine were taken in the late 80s here at the Chelsea.  The photo of Merrilee Cohen (Rachel’s sister) and Catherine were taken at Norman Gosney’s Halloween party in 1987 or 88.