Close-Up on War , livre ebook

ABRAMS BOOKS - Farrell Mary Cronk Farrell

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

222 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

The incredible story of Catherine Leroy, one of the few woman photographers during the Vietnam War, told by an award-winning journalist and children's author From award-winning journalist and children's book author Mary Cronk Farrell comes the inspiring and fascinating story of the woman who gave a human face to the Vietnam War. Close-Up on War tells the story of French-born Catherine Leroy, one of the war's few woman photographers, who documented some of the fiercest fighting in the 20-year conflict. 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. Later, Leroy was gravely wounded from shrapnel, but that didn't keep her down more than a month. When captured by the North Vietnamese in 1968, she talked herself free after photographing her captors, scoring a cover story in Life magazine. A recipient of the George Polk Award, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, Leroy was one of the most well-known photographers in the world during her time, and her legacy of bravery and compassion endures today. Farrell interviewed people who knew Leroy, as well as military personnel and other journalists who covered the war. In addition to a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Peter Arnot, the book includes a preface, author's note, endnotes, bibliography, timeline, and index.

Sujets

Viêt Nam

Vietnam

Histoire

Informations

Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	22 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683359685
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0932€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

All photographs taken by Catherine Leroy
( Dotation Catherine Leroy [DCL]), unless otherwise noted.
Please see this page for Image Credits.
Each letter in the chapter openers is an excerpt from an actual letter written by Catherine Leroy. Her letters were typed or handwritten but have been adjusted here for design and readability purposes. Certain elements like the recipient, date, and location are accurate to the original letter so aren t always consistent in form. An original letter is reproduced on this page .

Caption for previous spread: Catherine Leroy, photographed by French colleague Gilles Caron, during an operation with the 1st Air Cavalry Division, Vietnam, December 1967. ( Fondation Gilles Caron)
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-4661-1 eISBN 978-1-68335-968-5
Text 2022 Mary Cronk Farrell
Edited by Howard W. Reeves
Book design by Melissa Jane Barrett
Published in 2022 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Amulet Books is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
To the photographers and journalists imprisoned, murdered, or killed while working to get the facts
CONTENTS
Map
Foreword by Peter Arnett
Chapter 1: A Man s War
Chapter 2: On the Ground in Vietnam
Chapter 3: Worlds Collide in Saigon
Chapter 4: Born to the Sound of Bombs
Chapter 5: Nowhere Near As Much Fun As You d Think
Chapter 6: They Did Not Accept Me
Chapter 7: Itching for Action
Chapter 8: Is This Why They Call It Olive Drab?
Chapter 9: Proving Myself Under Fire
Chapter 10: Not Very Pretty
Chapter 11: Like You ve Never Felt Alive Before
Chapter 12: Jumping for Joy
Chapter 13: A Door Opens to the Sky
Chapter 14: Everything Rotted
Chapter 15: A Big, Professional Success in Every Way
Chapter 16: Rumors and Gossip
Chapter 17: Battle for Hill 881
Chapter 18: Front-Page Pictures
Chapter 19: C n Ti n, Hill of Angels
Chapter 20: Thirty-Five Pieces of Shrapnel
Chapter 21: A Bombshell for T t
Chapter 22: The Enemy Has a Face
Chapter 23: Return to Hu
Chapter 24: Photos First Class
Chapter 25: The Biggest High of All
Epilogue
Author s Note
How a Camera Worked in the 1960s
Glossary
Timeline
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Index of Searchable Terms

The Republic of Vietnam *
A government established in the southern city of Saigon ** whose leaders often subverted the rule of law and democratic norms, causing problems for the United States. The United States supported the government and sent money and military advisers to organize and train South Vietnamese military forces, called the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
A Communist government established by H Ch Minh in the northern city of H N i. In 1954, Ho s followers the Vi t Minh formed the People s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), called by Americans the North Vietnamese Army.
National Liberation Front of South Vietnam
A Communist organized armed resistance movement in South Vietnam. It fought against the ARVN and the US military. Its members and guerrilla fighters, the People s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), were called the derogatory name Vi t C ng by Americans.
* The American spelling of Vi t Nam, Vietnam, is used in this book to reflect American perspective.
** The American name Saigon is used in this book. Today, the city is named H Ch Minh City.
I met Cathy Leroy when I was a young war photographer in Vietnam, and she was already famous for her pictures in Life magazine. I was very impressed that she was as brave and as professional as my male photographer colleagues. In later years, Cathy and I became friends in Los Angeles, where she had moved, and I was with the Associated Press bureau there. We both covered the 1992 Los Angeles racial riots, where I saw again how daring and talented Cathy was in such a dangerous crisis. In the years before her death, she would visit the AP bureau and we would lunch at a nearby dim sum restaurant and talk about the old days in Vietnam.
-Hu nh C ng t , known professionally as Nick Ut, a Vietnamese American photographer for the Associated Press (AP), winner of both the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year for The Terror of War, depicting children in flight from a napalm bombing during the Vietnam War
FOREWORD
Civilian photographers, working with skill and daring alongside American soldiers fighting the Vietnam War, produced images remarkable for their graphic depiction of combat. Among them was Catherine Leroy, a young French woman who was inspired to become a war photographer by photos she had seen published in Paris newspapers and magazines. In her three years in Vietnam, she took photos striking in their immediacy and technical proficiency that were widely published by the Associated Press news agency and in the major photo magazines Life and Look . But her contributions to the uniquely voluminous Vietnam War photo archives have been largely overlooked in comparison to the pictures taken by male professional photographers from mainstream news organizations, such as Larry Burrows, Eddie Adams, Horst Faas, David Kennerly, and Hu nh C ng Nick t.
In the mid-twentieth-century United States, there were growing numbers of professional woman photographers, generally assigned to cover routine news stories at home. However, news managers sent all-male staffs to Vietnam and earlier wars such as the Korean War. They saw no place in war reporting for women. So, Cathy s being in Vietnam was extraordinary-women simply were not players in photojournalism at the time.
I first met Cathy in the Associated Press news agency s Saigon bureau in early 1966 in the office of our chief photographer, Horst Faas, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his Vietnam pictures. He was assembling a team of freelance photographers to meet the growing demand from newspapers for frontline photographs of the war. Cathy was twenty-one years old, around five feet tall, and slim, with her braided blond hair hanging down to her shoulders. She spoke limited English, but she radiated enthusiasm, and she had an expensive Leica camera that she was just learning to use. Horst Faas was impressed with Cathy s determination and hired her, paying the going rate of fifteen American dollars for each of her pictures used by the Associated Press.
Cathy faced many dangers as she began covering the war. Two Associated Press photographers had been killed in action in 1965, as well as the legendary photojournalist Dickey Chapelle, the first American woman journalist killed in combat. The male Vietnam combat press corps did not welcome Cathy, and she was patronized and ridiculed. And the military made limited concessions for the privacy of the women journalists. Cathy brushed aside the disapproval. She had discovered that politeness opened no doors for her. She mastered an earthy vocabulary of French-accented profanity to use against military bureaucrats who tried to stop her path. She won the admiration of the American infantrymen and marines she accompanied into battle for weeks at a time. In the field, the solders loved her jaunty personality and bravery.
As a correspondent for the Associated Press, I sometimes worked alongside Cathy covering American infantry units in 1966 and 1967. One trip I recall was with her and photographer Michel Renard on a week-long patrol with soldiers of the US First Cavalry Division along the central coast. We slogged through muddy paddy fields and mangrove swamps, watching villages burn to the ground and ducking firefights with the enemy. In the evenings we chewed on canned military rations and crouched over our legs with lighted cigarettes to burn off the leeches, just like the soldiers were doing. Cathy later wrote a note to assuage her mother s concern about personal hygiene in the field, I just go behind a tree when I need to pee.
Unlike in earlier conflicts, such as World Wars I and II, when the American public was fully mobilized and the press censored, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon governments responsible for the Vietnam War believed that the military and political goals were limited and could be achieved without imposing controls on the press. With free access to combat units, Cathy captured breathtaking images of American soldiers in the heat of battle that were used across newspaper front pages and on magazine covers and featured in television news programs. By her perseverance and bravery, she had become the professional equal of the better-known male photographers who worked for the world s top news organizations.
Cathy deserves to be remembered. She broke through the barriers of a male-dominated profession and led the way for the bold women photographers who follow her example in crisis areas today.
-Peter Arnett, awarded the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his work in Vietnam during the war
Chapter 1
A MAN S WAR
Vientiane, Laos
February 1966 1
Maman [Mom],
A very long and tiring journey. Here are my first impressions of East Asia. Vientiane, comparable to a second category provincial town, but very much dirtier, many kids (too many), a great many stray dogs, very poor but welcoming people.
Cath

F-100Ds of the 481st Tactical Fighter Squadron over South Vietnam, February 1966. Early F-100s were unpainted when they arrived in Southeast Asia like the foreground aircraft, but all eventually received camouflage paint like the aircraft in the back. (Credit: National Museum of the US Air Force)

Aerial view of Tan Son Nhut Air Ba