This is a picture I did not take
of famed Vietnam war photographer Catherine Leroy, wearing all-black and
perfectly framed while standing in a doorway in the basement of the
Journalism School at U. C. Berkeley, signing
a book for an admirer, one half-hour after
participating in a panel discussion about the nature of photojournalism in
a time of war, in which three of the four correspondents on the panel
admitted to their recent decisions never to cover another war, which
illuminated how much the media (and the consuming public) has changed
since 1966, when Leroy was twenty-one and living in France with her new
Leica, and had just saved-up enough money to purchase a one-way ticket to
Saigon, which led to her career as a photojournalist, incredible pictures
like these, getting captured by the North Vietnamese,
and ultimately tonight, lit by flouresence, standing (perfectly framed) in
a basement doorway.