Catherine Leroy was born in Paris in 1944, in a city that still smelled of damp coal and the promises of reconstruction.
She grew up listening to stories from a continent trying to forget the war, and precisely because of that, she decided that silence was not the opposite of conflict, but rather its most dangerous disguise.
At twenty-one she pawned her Vespa, bought a one-way ticket to Saigon, and hung a Leica M2 around her neck with a single goal: to photograph the Vietnam War from within. It might sound like youthful bravado or a romantic impulse, but looking at her early negatives, one understands that the decision was born from a lucid conviction: if you do not know the face of fire, you cannot measure the size of the wound.
She arrived in 1966, just as the US military escalation was turning every rice paddy into a tactical chessboard. The famous photographers embedded with American units, but Leroy slipped in through the back door of endurance: she managed to get accreditation as a freelancer for Paris Match and boarded an evacuation helicopter with a pack heavier than she was. She was one meter fifty-four and weighed forty kilos, too light for a standard bulletproof vest, so she stitched one together from tent canvas and slipped aluminum plates into the pockets. She was not seeking heroism, just proximity. Her method was simple: stay close enough to hear the breathing of the soldier firing, and cold enough not to freeze at the first scream.
They called her the little French woman who jumps, because to get perspective she would leap onto muddy mounds and shoot mid-air at low shutter speeds, creating a slight blur that conveyed the actual shake of the explosion. That technique became her signature, a resource some editors dismissed as a flaw but which she defended as the physical imprint of fear. One of her first reports showed a US marine running through the brush under Vietcong fire. The soldier is blurred, but the bushes, rooted to the ground, remain sharp; the contrast illustrates human vulnerability against the unshaken stillness of the jungle. The photo was published on the cover, and Le Nouvel Observateur titled it The War According to a Twenty-Year-Old Woman.
She soon understood that the front line does not stop at the battlefield. She photographed field hospitals, bombed villages, makeshift funerals by the roadside, and, most importantly, the eyes of the enemy. In 1967 she became the first reporter to embed with a Vietcong unit during the Battle of Hue. She negotiated her entry with an interpreter and offered French cigarettes in exchange for an escort. The images show teenage fighters eating burnt rice among ruins, oblivious to the camera flash and the label of villains. When Life published the series, a US colonel exclaimed it was enemy propaganda. Leroy replied in an interview, Pain does not recognize flags, only flesh.
Her crucial moment came in 1968 during the Tet Offensive. She accompanied the 173rd Airborne Division on a combat parachute jump over Khe Sanh. At four thousand meters, she jumped without thinking that she was the first female photographer to take part in a combat jump. She landed, rolled on the ground, grabbed her Leica, got soaked in mud, and started shooting with the shutter nearly jammed by humidity. A bullet grazed her ear and shattered the UV filter, leaving her with a high-pitched ringing she would carry for life. But from that burst came the photo that would later grace the cover of TIME magazine: two soldiers dragging a comrade who clenches his teeth to keep from screaming, while a burst of napalm ignites the background. It is impossible to see the image and not smell the gasoline, impossible not to feel the weight of a body sinking into the blood-soaked canvas.
After Vietnam, in 1972, she flew to Northern Ireland to cover Bloody Sunday, and in 1975 she landed in Beirut with her determination intact. There she learned that alleyways are vertical trenches and that the echo of mortars blends with the call to prayer from minarets. She witnessed a moment when a teenage Christian militiaman prays with a rosary in hand while her companion holds a rifle. The photo circulated in agencies and sparked a fierce debate: was she romanticizing violence, or exposing the infantilization of combat? Leroy let the controversy settle and moved on to Cyprus, then Bangladesh, then Iran during the revolution. Her passport read like a minefield, and each stamp was a new entry into precariousness.
She did not chase adrenaline; she sought the trace of war on faces. She refused to photograph lined-up corpses, preferring to show the trembling hands of a nurse suturing under a flashlight or the gesture of a mother smoothing her child’s singed hair. Her ethics aimed for intimacy. For her, a conflict could be condensed into a torn shirt hem or the rust stain left by chemical rain on a tank. She said that detail speaks more than panorama, because horror must slip in through the cracks of the everyday to be believable.
Over time, awards came: the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1976 and the Overseas Press Club plaque. But the honors weighed less than the constant migraines and the post-traumatic stress that manifested in sleepless nights. In 1983 she returned to Paris and set the camera down for years. She worked editing archives for agencies and gave lectures warning about the banalization of violence in the color era. She warned that new devices could distance the photographer from the real blood behind the lens. Her advice was to get close enough to smell the cordite, to realize that every war photograph is also a self-portrait of one’s own fear.
“I think of the U.S. Marines like we used to think of the Foreign Legion; as big mouths with big hearts.”
In the 1990s she turned her attention to post-communist conflicts: Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, where she advised young reporters not so much to photograph but to learn to read the light of a bombed-out street. She pointed out the difference between visual fireworks and documentary honesty. She asked them to walk with refugees, carry sacks of wheat, hold babies, so they would understand that the camera is a mirror of intention. To one of her students she said, If you aim only at the explosion, you photograph gunpowder; if you aim twenty seconds before, you photograph humanity.
In 2006 a sudden pneumonia stopped her pulse in a California hospital, where she lived in quiet retirement with her cat Violette and a box of negatives she never digitized. Today her work rests in the French National Archives and in private collections that sell for millions. But the real legacy floats in hundreds of frames scattered across newsrooms around the world: contact sheets that reveal the moment when a projectile cuts through the composition and forces the photographer to duck. Those perforated film edges are proof of her method: stay close, take risks, bring the viewer the ragged breathing of war.
Revisiting her photographs in 2025 feels urgent. When wars are broadcast live and saturation dulls the senses, Leroy’s images restore the tremor. Her rebellion was not to seek the bloodiest snapshot, but to resist the banality that turns destruction into spectacle. Against the obsessive zoom of drones, she defended the shared heartbeat. Against the post-production that cleans the blood, she preferred the splatter that makes you smell the iron. Against the epic narrative, she let photography be an open question: what will we do with this pain that now belongs to us too?
Perhaps the best way to describe her is to imagine her at a crossroads, Leica swinging like an amulet, bootlaces soaked in mud. In her pocket she keeps an exposed roll of film and a notebook with two words underlined: look close. That phrase sums up her path, an itinerary that crosses wars and returns them as intimate flashes, stripped of propaganda, charged with the dignity of someone who chooses to expose themselves to tell the story others would rather forget. Catherine Leroy asked with every click of the shutter whether the world was ready to bear its own story told without embellishment. The answer remains unresolved, written in the flash of light that captures an anonymous face before it dissolves into the darkness of shrapnel.
