Gilles Courtinat wrote a beautiful tribute to Catherine Leroy, one of the great photojournalists of the last century, now forgotten, in Dredi, Michel Puech’s weekly magazine on photojournalism. Atelier EXB Editions publishes a book on her images of Vietnam.
Catherine Leroy, “When you’re young, you might as well live dangerously.”
This is a book of photos and words by photographer Catherine Leroy. At 21, she decided to break away from a mundane life and embark on the riskiest adventure of her time: becoming a war photographer in Vietnam.
In February 1966, with no professional experience but driven by fierce determination and a great deal of nerve, Catherine Leroy equipped herself with a Leica camera bought on credit, scraped together enough money for a one-way plane ticket, and flew to Saigon. She then entered, almost by force, a world of men: that of war correspondents, soldiers, and mercenaries, where women were rare and almost always marginalized. The book “A One-Way Ticket to Vietnam 1966-1968” is a record of these three years during which the young woman immersed herself in the heart of the conflict. The work combines her photographs, some of which have never been published, with her letters to her parents, documents moving in their spontaneity and lucidity. These writings reveal the intimacy of her daily life: the material difficulties, the incessant search for freelance work with press agencies, the illness, the injuries, but also the bursts of joy, the intoxication of action and the feeling of being “carried along by events“.
Upon her arrival in Vietnam, she understood that her position as a woman could be both a handicap and an advantage. Scorned by some French colleagues who considered her an intruder, she found greater support among American journalists. Her nationality and uniqueness sometimes opened unexpected doors for her: a colonel, amused by her audacity, took her on a helicopter mission. A general granted her access to his troops, and another soldier welcomed her like a respected mascot. But she had to constantly regain this legitimacy by walking, sleeping, and fighting alongside the soldiers, enduring hunger, fatigue, and fear with them.
The letters she sent meticulously described this strange war, without a front line, where an invisible enemy lurked in the rice paddies and jungle. She shared the boys’ lives and photographed the assaults, the bombings, the death, but also the moments of waiting and discouragement. Her stories evoke scenes of great intensity: teenagers demonstrating against the Saigon government, the wounded lying on improvised stretchers, exhausted, haggard soldiers who confided in her that they wrote “anything” to their families to reassure them.
Catherine Leroy stands out for her ability to penetrate the world of the fighters and be accepted as one of their own. In her letters, she describes how she flouted conventions, shared rations, didn’t hesitate to sleep under a poncho with several GIs, and endured the same exhausting marches. She emphasized the importance of appearing as dirty and tired as they were in order to be recognized. This immersion creates powerful images: blank stares, gestures of brotherhood, the intensity of the fighting, brutality inflicted on prisoners, and young faces prematurely worn by war.
Her audacity led her to an unprecedented feat: in February 1967, she became the first woman to make a combat jump with the American paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne, during Operation Junction City. She jumped alongside 700 men and photographed the action from the sky. As she was small and petite, she had to be weighted down so that she wouldn’t land far from the theater of operations. The event made headlines in the international press, from Life to the New York Times. She was justifiably proud of it: not only had she proven that a woman could participate in a military operation of this type, but she had also achieved professional recognition that placed her among the great reporters of her time.
But behind this success, the reality remained bitter. She lived in constant insecurity: her income depended on the number of photos sold to agencies or magazines. She raged against competitors who tried to exclude her, fought to renew her accreditations, suffered from malaria and injuries, and endured the loneliness of returning to Saigon, a festive but oppressive city. Her letters reveal her remarkable lucidity. They reflect her unique personality ironic, independent, and sometimes brutal. She knows that war is absurd, that her images can be used for opposing propaganda, but she considers it her mission to be a witness, to see and to show.
She says she refuses to be trapped by feelings, is wary of romantic relationships, and asserts that she “keeps her heart for something else.” She claims a marginal existence, “homeless, but exhilarating,” convinced that it is better to live dangerously than give in to a bourgeois life. Her biting humor is mixed with disturbing confidences, such as when she confides that she wanted to throw herself into the Mekong after thinking she had lost her press card.
Her photographs and letters also reveal the contradictions of Vietnam: the lightness of moments of rest, the shows organized for the soldiers, the Tet celebrations in Saigon where firecrackers merge with gunfire, contrast with the harshness of military operations and the daily vision of death. Catherine Leroy manages to restore this ambivalence: a war both distant and close, where violence coexisted with moments of humanity.
What is striking in this testimony, made up of unvarnished images and words, is the voice of a young woman barely out of her teens who chose to voluntarily expose herself to the horrors of war in order to exist as a photographer. Even today, her work resonates as that of a pioneer of photojournalism, who paved the way for other women and who was able to give a human face to a war too often reduced to statistics or geopolitical issues. “Let’s just say that I walk around with my eyes open, my wallet still light, and that this vagrant life, all in all, pleases me. And damn it, when you’re young, you might as well live dangerously. My activities are exciting; I’m carried along by events, and here, as you know, there’s no shortage of them!”
In 1968, she left Vietnam but returned in 1975 during the fall of Saigon, and then in 1980 to a reunified country. Despite the power of her work, she died in Los Angeles in 2006 at the age of 61, in relative obscurity. This book, the result of the work of the Catherine Leroy Endowment created in 2011, retraces her journey and offers the reader the opportunity to (re)discover the world of a great war photographer.
Gilles Courtinat / L’œil de l’info (www.loeildelinfo.fr)
Catherine Leroy : One-Way Ticket to Vietnam, 1966-1968
Ed. Atelier EXB
240 pages
157 photographs
45 €
www.exb.fr
