Shutterbabe
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What if the protagonist in that age-old tale--boy goes to war, comes back a man--were a female? Shutterbabe, Deborah Copaken Kogan's remarkable debut, is just that: the story of a twenty-two-year-old girl from Potomac, Maryland, who goes off to photograph wars and comes back, four years and one too many adventures later, a woman.In 1988, fresh out of Harvard, Kogan moved to Paris with a small backpack, a couple of cameras, the hubris of a superhero, and a strong thirst for danger. She wanted to see what a war would look like when seen from up close, to immerse herself in a world where the gun is God. Naively, she figured it would be easy to filter death through the prism of her wide-angle lens. She was dead wrong.Within weeks of arriving in Paris, after knocking on countless photo agency doors and begging to be sent where the action was, Kogan found herself on the back of a truck in Afghanistan, her tiny frame veiled from head to toe, the only woman -- and the only journalis -- in a convoy of rebel freedom fighters. Kogan had not actually planned on shooting the Afghan war alone. However, the beguiling French photographer she'd entrusted with both her itinerary and her heart turned out to be as dangerously unpredictable as, well, a war. It is the saga of both her relationship with this French-man and her assignment in Afghanistan that fuels the first of Shutterbabe's six page-turning chapters, each covering a different corner of the globe and each ultimately linked to the man Kogan was involved with at the time. From Zim-babwe to Romania, from Russia to Haiti, Kogan takes her readers on a heartbreaking yet surprisingly hilarious journey through a mine-strewn decade, her personal battles against sexism, battery, and even rape blending seamlessly with the historical struggles of war, revolution, and unfathomable abuse it was her job to record.In the end, what was once adventurous to the girl began to weigh heavily on the woman. Though her photographs were often splashed across the front pages of international newspapers and magazines, though she was finally accepted into photojournalism's macho fraternity, with each new assignment, with each new affair, Kogan began to feel there was something more she was after. Ultimately, what she discovered in herself was a person -- a woman -- for whom life, not death, is the one true adventure to be cherished above all.
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Deborah Copaken Kogan graduated from Harvard in 1988 and plunged straight into the world of photojournalism. Like most fresh grads, reality is something college doesn t prepare you for.[return][return]Living in Paris, she knocked on agency doors for an assignment. Within weeks, she was in Afghanistan with Pascal, a more senior photojournalist who promised that he would help get her into the thick of the war.[return][return]The book opens with her travelling in a group of mujahideen - rebel “freedom fighters”, shortly after Pascal abandoned her, forcing her to make her own arrangements. So her short career in photojournalism begins, and they lead her into some very hairy situations, in parts of history that I was too young to care about at the time.[return][return]Kogan gives us a peek into the world of the photojournalist fraternity, a group dominated by men. For that reason, the book is broken down into six chapters that relates to a man in her life and career - starting with Pascal, who took her into her first war and ending with her son Jacob, who is the reason she decided to end her career. [return][return]Her memoirs, candid as it may be in some places, is eye-opening to those of us who have no idea how the international media works. It also hammers home the fact that it is sometimes necessary for journalists to lie, bribe and persuade so that their journey would not be for nothing, and they will bring back images that will help cover their expenses.[return][return]At one point of the book, Kogan described feeling like a vulture as she entered the scene to photograph an African poacher shot dead. There is, after all, no story without a dead body. Horrifying? That's the media industry.[return][return]Kogan's photographs have appeared in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, her freelance writing in The New York Times, Paris Match, and O, the Oprah Magazine, and her television segments on ABC News and Dateline NBC.[return]return
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I hated this book. I took as much as I could handle, then I had my wife summarize the details I missed. Despite a distillation of Kogan's laborious prose, even my wife's more patient (and more empathetic) retelling simply reinforced my opinion.
Kogan was a rape victim, a feminist and a floozie with an almost deliberate naivete and a Leica camera. After placing each item in her pack, she, courageously, ventured into the dog-eat-dog world of photojournalism. Her journeys were dangerous and defining. Her efforts were both noble and relatable.
The book is themed as a chronicling of love. This point is made, re-stated, reinforced, beaten with a stick, skewered and plated with garnish... ad-nauseam; much like this sentence.
Did I mention it's poorly written? Does she know more than one sentence are allowed in a paragraph. That one does not need to use cumbersome grammar to cram everything into a one-sentence paragraph. It's true... you can do that.
In the end she found love. She realized feminism was not her desired answer to love or life as she matured in both respects. I know many people have found, and will certainly continue finding, value in this memoir. For me, don't just skip it, read a thesaurus instead... which Kogan must surely have done, based on the incredibly forced vocabulary throughout.
