The Catherine Leroy Fund (Dotation Catherine Leroy or DCL) preserves and promotes Catherine Leroy’s legacy to make it available to scholars, historians, researchers, students, and to the general public, and to ensure its unique place in the history of photography. Since the Fund’s creation in 2011, over forty filmed interviews have been conducted in France and abroad with the men and women who knew or worked with Catherine Leroy in order to better understand the ways in which she operated in the field and to shed light on her character and motivations.
A not-for-profit organization founded in 2011, the Catherine Leroy Fund received its initial funding from Mrs. Denise Leroy (1914-2012), the mother of the photographer who had died in 2006. Her daughter’s sole heir, Denise Leroy donated Catherine’s works and transferred all artistic and intellectual property to the Fund. The Fund is the exclusive representative of Catherine Leroy’s work and legacy.
The Paris-based attorney-at-law, Isabelle Lescure, serves as the Fund’s counsel.
DCL’s Board Members
The Board of Trustees of the Fund is a working board consisting of volunteer members from the international photography world, several of whom have personally met or known Catherine Leroy in some professional capacity over the course of her career:
Matthias Bruggmann, Swiss. Graduate of the Ecole de Photographie (CEPV) in Vevey, Switzerland. Freelance photographer specialized in conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Extensive coverages of the recent war in Syria and the current conflict in Ukraine. Based in Lausanne. DCL co-Founder.
Dominique Deschavanne, French. A former picture editor at the daily Libération and at the weekly L’Express in Paris. Freelance journalist and photography writer. Currently the Director of the European office of the Contact Press Images photo-agency (Paris). DCL co-Founder. Vice-Chair.
Kristen Gresh, American. Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Worked as curator and taught history of photography in Cairo then Paris, where she wrote her PhD dissertation on The Family of Man at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Joined the Board of the DCL in 2025. Secretary.
Fred Ritchin, American. Writer, editor, curator, and software developer. Dean Emeritus of the International Center for Photography school (ICP). Founder and director of Pixel Press. Former professor of photography and imaging at New York University. Co-founder of Writing With Light, advocating for nonfiction photography. DCL co-Founder and Chairman of the Board from 2020 through 2025. Treasurer.
Pauline Vermare, dual French, American citizenships. Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum. Formerly, in New York, the cultural director of Magnum Photos, a curator at the International Center of Photography and various positions at The Museum of Modern Art following debuts in Paris at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. Joined the Board of the DCL in 2020. Chair.
At the January 2026 meeting of the Board of the DCL, its members expressed their deep indebtedness to retiring Robert Pledge, the President of Contact Press Images (New York & Paris) and co-Founder of both the “Association Catherine Leroy” in 2007 and, four years later, of the “Dotation Catherine Leroy,” of which he was the first Chair of the Board (2012-2019), for his numerous initiatives and accomplishments over two decades aimed at preserving and promoting the name and legacy of Catherine Leroy following her death in July 2006.
The Board also expresses its profound gratitude to the late-Bernard Estrade, the Agence France Presse (AFP) foreign correspondent and chief-editor, who was Catherine Leroy’s companion in the 70s and early 80s, for his many contributions and his invaluable wisdom. He died in Paris in March 2011.
An advisory committee made up of a dozen experts from different nationalities and professions, all related to photography, includes: Lynsey Addario, Jane Evelyn Atwood, David Burnett, Patrick Chauvel, Raymond Depardon, Ayperi Ecer (a former DCL Board member), Carol Guzy, Emmanuel Joffet, Jean-François Leroy, Ken Light, Don McCullin and Christine Spengler. The committee, chaired by Grazia Neri, the founder of the now defunct famous Italian photographic agency by the same name, advises and audits the Board.