This is the story of lives of two families who struggle with diseases associated with Agent Orange.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S military sprayed some 12 million gallons of the Agent Orange defoliant over Vietnam. Â Now, almost four decades later, the toxic herbicide continues to have a devastating effect on thousands of Vietnamese people. Passed down genetically, Agent Orange has caused various diseases and deformities in three generations of Vietnamese families.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, the daughter of an American journalist, San Francisco-based photographer Catherine Karnow seems destined to have travel and photo-journalism at the center of her life. She studied photography in high school, and graduated Brown University with honors degrees in Comparative Literature and Semiotics. After a brief career as a filmmaker �¢?? her film Brooklyn Bridge premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 �¢?? she turned her attention to photography full time in 1986.
Catherine has covered Australian Aborigines; Bombay film stars; victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam; Russian �¢??Old Believers�¢?? in Alaska; Greenwich, Connecticut high society; and an Albanian farm family. In 1994, she was the only non-Vietnamese photo-journalist to accompany General Giap on his historic first return to the forest encampment in the northern Vietnam highlands from which he plotted the battle of Dien Bien Phu. She also gained unprecedented access to Prince Charles for her 2006 National Geographic feature, �¢??Not Your Typical Radical.�¢??
Her work appears in National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, French & German GEO and other international publications. She has also participated in several Day in the Life series, Passage to Vietnam, and Women in the Material World. Catherine Karnow is known for her vibrant, emotional and sensitive style of photographing people.
