All Grants | Cycle 1 –
Yasmine Nachabe Taan is a Professor of Art and Design and the Director of the Institute of Art in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Her interdisciplinary research cuts across the fields of visual culture, gender politics, photography and design history with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. In 2020, she received the Design History Society Research Grant for her research on Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui, The First Lebanese Woman Graphic Designer to Brand her Nation (2023). She is the author of Reading Marie al-Khazen’s Photographs (2020).
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Profile Links
Faculty Page at Lebanese American University
Research Links
Orcid Research Links
Publication Links
“A Contrapuntal Reading of Catherine Leroy’s Photograph of a Fedayee Taken During the Civil War in Lebanon (1975–1990)” (Photographies, 2025)
“The Image as a Site of Transgression: The Case of Beirut Counter-Visuality Since October 2019” (Social Movement Studies, 2023)
Reading Marie al-Khazen’s Photographs: Gender, Photography, Mandate Lebanon (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020)
Fashioning the Modern Middle East: Gender, Body, and Nation (Co-editor, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021)
Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui: The First Lebanese Woman Graphic Designer to Brand her Nation (Khatt Books, 2023)
Other Links
10×10 Research Grant Presentation Video (Yasmine Nachabe Taan—00:05:28)
Summary of Research Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
Catherine Leroy’s Work in Beirut
My 10×10 Research Grant on Photobook History was used to conduct research focusing on Catherine Leroy’s God Cried (Quartet Books Ltd, 1983), a little-known photobook about the intense and violent conflicts in Beirut, the city from which I am from.
Catherine Leroy (1944-2006) was a diminutive French photographer with an intense and driven personality. She started off her career as a freelance combat photographer in 1966 in Vietnam when she was only twenty-one years old, traveling there on her own from Paris with one camera and $100. In one of her interviews, Leroy sarcastically said, “Being a woman helped tremendously when shooting photos in war zones. People tend to protect me as they assume that women are helpless … ” As a combat photographer, having been injured several times—she lived the rest of her life with shrapnel in her body—and even captured in 1976 by the North Vietnamese, she often risked her life to cover dangerous conflict zones. Leroy was never a passive observer; rather, she was an engaged and often angry photographer—angry at governments and policy makers for making the wrong decisions and inflicting more suffering.
As a pioneering woman combat photographer, her work has remained largely unknown. In fact, when four well-known women war photographers were invited to a memorial service to speak after Catherine’s death in 2006, none had ever heard of her before.
After the war in Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, she moved to Beirut to cover the conflict there. Leroy worked in Beirut and published, with Tony Clifton, a photobook in 1983 entitled God Cried that was subject to many controversies. Significantly, it is the only book of Leroy’s photographs that was published in the photographer’s lifetime (nor have any monographs been published since she died). God Cried is a significant but unfortunately not well-recognized photobook that covers events—including the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the siege of Beirut by the Israeli army in 1982—in an underrepresented region at the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990).
In some of the photographs featured in God Cried, we can see that the photographer was very close to the subject photographed and the dangerous zone in which the photos were taken. These photographs tell visceral truths. Leroy strongly believed that a photograph can make an impact. According to her, a photo has the power to change policymakers’ decisions. For her, photographs are evidence for people to see what really happened. “The ugliness of war should be confronted,” she said in an interview. For her exceptional courage in covering the civil war in Lebanon that provided an alternative historical narrative to the war, Leroy received the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award in 1976. She is the first woman to receive this award.
However, very little has been written on God Cried and Catherine Leroy’s career in Beirut in the 1970s and ’80s. Her life’s work has been marginalized, a source of great bitterness to her in her later years.
For this grant, my research on God Cried brings forward Leroy’s photos of Beirut and the way they underline the violence and pain of that era—issues that continue in the Beirut of today. Her photos in God Cried are traces of atrocities committed by regimes of violence against humanity. Leroy has vehemently argued that her photos form an “accusation” that defies regimes of violence. They defy “silence” and give voice to the otherwise unheard. I aim to examine in what ways Leroy’s photographs are considered “accusations” in the context of Lebanon’s civil war and how they can be considered agents of change. I am also interested in analyzing how her work in Beirut compares to the extensive work that she had previously done in Vietnam during the war.
I myself am a photo historian from Beirut (I am fluent in English, French, and Arabic) and lived in Beirut during the same period that Catherine worked there. Interestingly, my mother was a doctor at the Sabra and Shatila hospital when Catherine worked there as well. With research support from the team at Catherine Leroy Fund (dotationcatherineleroy.org) and access to the foundation’s archival material, I have accessed Leroy’s Beirut correspondence and that of her companion in Beirut, Bernard Estrade, who was also a journalist.
In addition to searching for Beirut-related documents in Leroy’s archive, I conducted a series of interviews with persons who were in contact with Leroy during the period when she was in Beirut, such as the writer of God Cried, Tony Clifton, who currently lives in Melbourne, Don McCullin, Eugene Richards, and many other photographers. I was also in contact with Fred Ritchin who was a friend of Leroy and has written a number of articles about her, as well as another friend, Robert Pledge, as well as Jacques Menasche, who did a film on Catherine’s letters to her parents which were written while she was in Vietnam, and also interviewed some of her colleagues in recent years. The just-published book by Elizabeth Becker, You Don’t Belong Here, on three women journalists who covered the Vietnam War, features Catherine prominently, the first time that both she and her work have been taken seriously in a larger conversation. I compare Leroy’s work to that of local photographers in Lebanon through the Arab Image Foundation.