Catherine karnow general giap biography
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Photographer Catherine Karnow: Vietnam Is My Story
Motivation, opportunity, and a personal invitation took photographer Catherine Karnow to Vietnam for the first time in July 1990.
Catherine Karnow’s retrospective, “Vietnam: 25 Years of a Documenting a Changing Country,” spans nearly her entire career as a professional photographer. The exhibition, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, includes photographs taken during the years of the most dramatic change seen in modern-day Vietnam, from 1990 – 2014, while on assignment for National Geographic, Smithsonian, as well as many self-assigned trips.
Karnow fell in love with photography at the age of 15. With the support and encouragement of her first photography teacher, she quickly became a serious photographer.
After graduating from Brown University with a degree in comparative literature and semiotics and premiering her first film at the Berlin Film Festival, Karnow spent nine months in Paris trying to get work as a photographer or photographer’s assistant. Finally, she got an assignment to shoot the Inside Guide to France, a project that led to editorial and corporate projects.
“I became a successful photographer very quickly after that first assignment, but I didn’t have a body of work,” say
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Catherine Karnow’s portrait of general Vo Nguyen Giap, a history teacher, who barely knew how to fire a gun. Trained by US military advisers during WWII, Giap went on to become the commanding general of one of the most formidable armies of the 20th century.
25 years ago, the late journalist and historian Stanley Karnow travelled back to Vietnam to finally meet the legendary Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap. Karnow’s daughter Catherine, a young photographer, went along a few months later and came to share her father’s unique access to the enigmatic North Vietnamese General.
Stanley Karnow, a veteran reporter of the wars against the French and subsequently the US-supported Saigon regime, was one of the very first Americans who anticipated the implications of the US engagement in Vietnam. Shortly after the Kennedy administration came into power, Karnow asked the President’s primary adviser Robert Kennedy, if Vietnam should not be seen as the major foreign policy challenge for the US.
“We got 30 Vietnam’s a day,” Robert Kennedy retorted.
Karnow went on to cover the war until the end in 1975. As the first American journalist after the war, he was allowed to visit communist Vietnam in 1982 on a research trip for his wi
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Catherine Karnow with Common Giap, 1994 Photograph by way of ©Catherine Karnow
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