Freelance Photographer
Catherine Karnow
Born and raised in Hong Kong, the daughter of an American journalist, San Francisco-based photographer Catherine Karnow studied photography in high school and graduated from 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. She gained unprecedented access to Prince Charles for her 2006 National Geographic feature, “Not Your Typical Radical.” In 1994, she was the only non-Vietnamese photojournalist 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 has photographed extensively in Vietnam since 1990; her story on Amerasians appeared in the June 2009 issue of Smithsonian.
Catherine’s 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.
