Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War

by Deborah Copaken

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The remarkable memoir of an ambitious young photojournalist who went off to war as a twenty-two-year-old girl—and came back, four years and many adventures later, a woman

“Eloquent and well observed, not only about the memoirist, but about the world: war, death, photojournalism and, of course, the worldwide battle between the sexes.” —The Washington Post Book World

In 1988, fresh out of Harvard, Deborah Copaken 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. Naïvely, 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 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 journalist—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.
 
Kogan found herself running from one corner of the globe to another, each linked to the man she was involved with at the time. From Zimbabwe 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 she had finally been accepted into photojournalism’s macho fraternity, her photographs splashed across the front pages of international newspapers and magazines, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375758683
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/08/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Deborah Copaken Kogan is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including Shutterbabe, The Red Book, and Between Here and April. A contributing writer at The Atlantic, and she was also a TV writer on Emily in Paris, a performer (The Moth, etc.), and an Emmy Award-winning news producer and photojournalist. Her photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Observer, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Slate, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Paris Match, among other publications. Her column, “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist,” was adapted for the Modern Love streaming series. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
Pascal
THERE'S A WAR GOING ON, AND I'M BLEEDING.

An unfortunate situation, to be sure, but considering it's 2 a.m., fresh snow is falling and I'm squished in the back of an old army truck with a band of Afghani freedom fighters who, to avoid being bombed by the Soviet planes circling above, have decided to drive without headlights through the Hindu Kush Mountains over unpaved icy roads laced with land mines, it's also one without obvious remedy. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Ask the driver to pull over for a sec so I can squat behind the nearest snowbank to change my tampon?

I don't think so.

It's February 1989. I am twenty-two years old. My toes are so cold, they're not so much mine anymore as they are tiny miscreants inside my hiking boots, refusing to obey orders. In my lap, hopping atop my thighs as the truck lurches, as my body shivers, sits a sturdy canvas Domke bag filled with Nikons and Kodachrome film, which I'm hoping to use to photograph the pullout of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

Actually, I have no idea how to photograph a Soviet pullout. Though this is my second story as a professional photojournalist, I'm still not clear on what it is photojournalists actually do in a real war.

The first story I covered, the intifadah, was more straightfor-

ward. Organized, even. I'd take the bus early every morning from my youth hostel in Jerusalem to the nearby American Colony Hotel, where all the other journalists were staying (and where I eventually wound up staying when my clothes were stolen from the youth hostel), and I'd go straight to the restaurant off the lobby. There, I'd ingratiate myself with any photographer I could find who had information about the day's planned demos, his own rental car, and a basket of leftover Danish.

After eating, we'd drive around the West Bank and wait for the Palestinian kids to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, which we knew they would do only once a critical mass of journalists had assembled. Then we'd record the resulting skirmishes onto rolls of color slide film while trying to evade arrest and/or seizure of our exposed films by the soldiers. Next, we'd all rush back to Jerusalem to the Beit Agron, the Israeli press office, where we would lie about what we'd just shot ("religious Jews," we'd say, or "landscapes,") and get our government-issued shipping forms stamped and signed accordingly. Finally, we'd head to the strange little cargo office at the airport in Tel Aviv to send our film on a plane back to our photo agencies in Paris. Simple.

But here in Afghanistan the situation is more obscure. I'm alone, for one, which among other things means I have no one to help me figure out basic puzzles like how to get my exposed film out of the mountains. Or how to write captions when no one around me speaks English, and I have no idea where, exactly, these photos are being taken or what it is I'm actually seeing. I'm just assuming that at some point, someplace, I will see some dead or bloody mujahed, or some dead or bloody Russian soldier, or some mujahed firing off his Kalashnikovs, or one of those great big Soviet tanks whose names I can never remember, or, well, something that looks vaguely warlike that I can shoot and send-again, it's murky to me exactly how-back to my photo agency in Paris.

I look over at Hashim, who's rearranging blankets, knapsacks and boxes of ammunition to clear more leg room on the crowded truck bed. He yanks my maroon nylon backpack from the center of the pile, fills in the newly empty space with a green metal box, mimes "Can I sit on this?" while pointing at my backpack, and, when I nod yes, he wedges it into a corner and plops his 180-pound rump right on top of it. A gentle crunching sound ensues, followed almost immediately by the smell of rubbing alcohol. Shit. My mind races to try to recall what else, besides the bottle of alcohol, I packed in that outside zippered pocket.

Then I remember. My box of Tampax. My one and only box of Tampax.

Well, now. I'm fucked.

Oblivious, Hashim slowly inhales a Winston cigarette and kneads his amber worry beads through his ragged fingers. Trained as a journalist, he's the one Afghani among my forty-seven escorts who actually speaks a few key English phrases such as "Food soon," "Danger, stay in cave," and "Toilet time, Miss Deborah?" But even though I know he will probably understand me if I say, "Please get off my bag," he definitely won't understand "because my tampons are exploding." And because "Please get off my bag" sounds sort of rude, and because the squishy backpack does look like a comfy place to sit while all of us are scrunched together on the back of this rickety old truck heading God knows where, and because my hygiene woes do not hold a candle to the miseries of jihad, I say nothing. Besides, I'm covered from head to toe in an electric-blue burka-an Islamic veil, worn like a Halloween ghost costume-which tends to hinder communication. Not only does it muffle my speech, it makes it impossible to guess, for example, that underneath all this rayon, under my shiny blue ghost costume, I cannot stop crying.

What on earth possessed me to come here?

In a word, Pascal. It's Pascal's fault I'm here all alone, and when I get back to Pakistan I'm going to kill him.

THE FIRST TIME I noticed Pascal it was from afar, at a café on the rue Lauriston near the Sygma photo agency. That would have been in late September 1988, about two weeks after I'd arrived in Paris, ready to start my life. Every day, I'd go to that same café and spy on the photojournalists eating lunch there. Most afternoons, I'd order a croque monsieur and place my

portfolio ever so casually on the chair in front of me, hoping that the sight of my work along with the Leica around my neck would somehow draw a photographer over to my table. In my fantasy, the photographer would ask to take a look at the pictures and then, duly impressed, he'd invite me to come join the rest of his gang at his table for an île flottante and a round of espressos. I'd sit down and, after modestly refusing to do so, I'd be persuaded by the other men-they were all men-to pass my portfolio around the group, one of whom would be an important photo editor who'd want to send me that very same afternoon to go cover a war. It didn't really matter which war because I knew better than to be picky. Any war would do.

But that was just the fantasy. In reality, I had to settle for eating my sandwiches alone and in silence.

On that first day I noticed Pascal, he strode like a bulldozer into the café, pushing in the cool autumn air from the outside with his angular torso. With what seemed like a single fluid motion, he unhitched the camera bag from his shoulder, placed it in the pile of sacks already there on the banquette, greeted his colleagues with an ironic "Salut, les potes!," pulled off his blue cashmere crew neck, knotted it around his shoulders, lit a cigarette and sat down to fondle a menu. His features were sharp and finely chiseled, his eyes sparkled with what appeared to be a touch of mild insanity, and his lips had corners that turned up when he smiled, like the Joker's in Batman. When his steak au poivre arrived, he sliced into it with the grace of an aristocrat, the tines of his fork facing down then up as one by one the freshly cut morsels disappeared into his mouth, each effortless bite punctuating the rhythm of his fraternal chatter. He is magnificent, I thought.

Pascal was an up-and-coming war photographer, and I admired his work. His pictures didn't just show action, they screamed action. Bombs exploding, young children crying, soldiers cowering, grimacing, dying. Exactly the kind of images that I was desperate to start shooting, if only I could figure out how.

After two weeks of getting nowhere with my portfolio-on-the-chair ploy and spending far too many francs on croque monsieurs, I realized I'd been going about it all wrong. With my shaky French, I called the general number for Sygma and asked to speak to Claude, the editor in charge of news photos. For whatever reason, perhaps because he couldn't understand me on the telephone, perhaps because it was a slow news day, he agreed to a meeting. The next afternoon, when I arrived at his desk, he started to laugh. "You're the little girl from the café," he said. A few of the photographers I'd been stalking, Pascal included, stared and tittered from behind the glass wall of the photographers' room.

As Claude flipped through my portfolio, which was bulging with photographs of strip clubs and the men who visit them, his eyes opened wider and he began to shake his head. Then he muttered "Putain!" I knew putain meant "whore," but at the time I did not know it could also be used idiomatically to mean something more tame, like "wow" or "holy cow." But before I could figure out where the epithet had been directed, at the strippers or at me, Claude looked up and said, "Tu voudrais aller où?"-

"Where would you like to go?"

I cocked my head. I crossed my arms. "Israel," I said, more of a dare than a word.

Claude smiled and, to my amazement, replied, "Fine." We made a deal: I'd pay for the trip; Sygma would pay for my film and development costs and then distribute the pictures upon my return. A break. At last.

As I turned to leave, Pascal caught my eye and winked. Whenever I thought about that wink afterwards, I'd shiver.

The next time I saw Pascal, it was two months later. I'd just arrived back from Jerusalem. Chip, my colleague and occasional lover, an American who'd lived in Paris for most of his adult life, invited me as his date to a dinner party Pascal was throwing with his live-in girlfriend in Paris. The live-in girlfriend part should have tipped me off, but then Pascal cornered me in the living room and challenged me, with his mischievous smirk, to a staring contest. No problem, I thought. I'll beat him hands down. But after what must have been less than sixty seconds of locking eyes with the man, I didn't just lose. I was hypnotized, rendered incapable of higher thought. Or even medium thought, like "Stay away. Girlfriend shares his bed."

Within minutes of losing the staring contest, and battling an overwhelming urge to sniff Pascal's neck, I cooked up a plan. It was a simple plan, really. One that would solve what I was beginning to understand would be a constant dilemma: companionship on the road. With our cameras in hand, we'd leave Paris, our worldly possessions, the live-in girlfriend, and my less sexy lovers behind. We'd spend the next couple of years traversing the planet, bouncing from coup to insurrection, war to revolution, passing our days shooting pictures and our nights under the stars, making love to the gentle thrum of incoming mortar fire.

Afterwards . . . well, I wasn't exactly sure. I didn't think in afterwards.

Okay, so I had an active fantasy life, but this time I could smell the thoughts as they popped into my head. Or maybe it was just the big slabs of steak that Élodie, the live-in girlfriend, was preparing in the kitchen. In any case, while Elodie was off in the kitchen preparing the meat, while Chip was embroiled in another conversation, Pascal suddenly turned to me, blew a puff of his cigarette into my face, and said, "I'm going to Afghanistan next week. Why don't you come with me?"

I sucked on my own cigarette, choked on it really, and blew the smoke back into his face. Then, composing myself, I shot him a conspiratorial smile. "Sure," I said. "Let's do it."

It was as simple, and as complicated, as that.

What People are Saying About This

John Hockenberry

A candid, sexy, and very funny romp that makes photojournalism seem like an X-treme sport. Deborah Copaken Kogan goes out and wrings enough terrifying heroics from the last bits of the twentieth century to make T.E. Lawrence jealous.
—John Hockenberry, author of Moving Violations and A River Out of Eden

From the Publisher

“Shutterbabe zooms in on passionate self-discovery.”
—USA Today

“Eloquent and well observed, not only about the memoirist, but about the world: war, death, photojournalism and, of course, the worldwide battle between the sexes.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“A candid account of one woman’s attempt to claim the spoils of the American feminist revolution under trying circumstances: alone, abroad, practicing an art that fosters machismo and thrusts her into the midst of the most paternalistic cultures in the world.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Shutterbabe, like all good war stories, is flashy and exciting, but it also tells the story of a tender-hearted woman who traded war’s excitement for that of family life.”
—The New York Times Book Review

John Burnham Schwartz

A wise and unforgettable book, written with courage and love and intelligence and humility and humor, by a remarkable woman who, through hard searching and a compassionate heart, has found all the right words with which to tell her extraordinary life.
—John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road

Reading Group Guide

1. This memoir begins with the loss of an egg (menstruation) in a minefield and ends with the birth of a child at home. Discuss the metamorphosis of the author’s conceptions of motherhood.

2. Often our knowledge about news events is shaped by the media’s portrayal of these events. At one point the author laments, after a photo of her climbing a Soviet tank is splashed across the front pages of newspapers, “Nobody wants to hear the truth when the myth is so much better.” Discuss the differences between the myths propagated by the media and realities the author saw in Israel (rock-throwing by the Palestinian children), Afghanistan (the mujehaddin yelling “Down with America!”), Holland (the quiet of the street versus the wire reports), Zimbabwe (a human life taken in the name of conservation), Romania (particularly the orphan photos), the former Soviet Union (the tank photo, the West’s embrace of perestroika versus the everyday reality of Soviet life), and even corporate America’s public lip service to family-friendly policies.

3. How do you think the author’s experiences with random everyday violence influence her choice of career. What about her subsequent abandonment of this career?

4. Examine the following statement from chapter five: “Whatever else we might choose to discuss, eventually it all comes back to either sex or the Holocaust.” What do you think this means?

5. How does the author’s Jewish identity affect her actions and thoughts? In the fourth chapter, the author discusses the Hebrew word for love, ahavah, which is etymologically related to the word for giving, hav. How are Judaic notions of love and charity woven throughout the book?

6. Each chapter in this book is named after a male of some significance in the author’s life. Three are lovers, one’s a good Samaritan, one’s her husband, one’s her son. Could this book have been written without the personal stories intertwined? Why do you think the author–an independent woman, crisscrossing the globe on her own–chose to title her chapters in such a way? What did each of these men teach her? What did she, in turn, teach them? Why do you think she dedicated the book to her daughter?

7. Seeking companionship, understanding, a connection with others is one of our most basic human drives. But opening oneself up emotionally, like covering wars, is also dangerous. It makes us vulnerable. The French have this concept imbedded in their language: aventure can mean either “love affair” or “adventure.” Discuss this parallel as it pertains to both the author’s relationships and her work as a photojournalist.

8. Throughout the ages, men have tried to control women and their bodies. Discuss this statement with regard to the author’s experiences both abroad (particularly in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe) and at home (particularly with regard to rape and assault.) Now take it further. How are all of the following things related: chastity belts, female genital mutilation, veils/headscarves/burkas, foot binding, high heels, workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, catcalls, spousal abuse, rape? Can you think of others?

9. Western art, more often than not, involves men gazing at women. What happens when women gaze at men? Do we accept the frank female gaze or try to crush it? What does the way you critique this book say about you, your sense of morality, your acceptance or rejection of the female gaze? How does your gender and/or sexual identity affect the way you read this book? How does your age, religious beliefs, marital status, education or upbringing affect it?

10. The author notes that all of her early heroes–Virginia Woolf, Diane Arbus, Sylvia Plath–committed suicide. Compare the prose of Woolf, the photos of Arbus, the poetry of Plath. How do the different forms of their self-expression nevertheless offer some similar themes? How much of their psychology do you think was self-propelled and how much was influenced by the mores and values of the historical period into which each was born? Would a Woolf, an Arbus or a Plath born at the end of the twentieth century be less likely to commit suicide or not?

11. The word “slut” has no male counterpart. Neither does the word “mistress.” How does gender-biased language affect out ideas about behavior?

12. How will this book alter the way you look at a photograph in a magazine now, if at all?

13. Is the embrace of family and its concomitant responsibilities an abandonment of feminism or an acceptance of biological reality? Why are many of the difficult choices faced by women–to abort or not, to “act like a man” or not, to marry or not, to procreate or not, to work outside the home or not–so fraught and politically charged that, whatever choices a woman makes, she will be lambasted by one camp or another for making them?

14. What about the book’s title? Think about the double entendre: “babe” meaning “naïve”; “babe” as an appropriation of male language. Do you think the title works as an ironic conceit, or does it undercut the book’s message?

15. How and why is humor used in this book? Is it ever inappropriately used? How do you deal with pain?

16. Would this book have been better served if the author had transformed her experiences into fiction? Why or why not?

Editorial Reviews

Shutterbabe zooms in on passionate self-discovery.”—USA Today

“Eloquent and well observed, not only about the memoirist, but about the world: war, death, photojournalism and, of course, the worldwide battle between the sexes.”—The Washington Post Book World

“A candid account of one woman’s attempt to claim the spoils of the American feminist revolution under trying circumstances: alone, abroad, practicing an art that fosters machismo and thrusts her into the midst of the most paternalistic cultures in the world.”—Chicago Tribune

“Shutterbabe, like all good war stories, is flashy and exciting, but it also tells the story of a tender-hearted woman who traded war’s excitement for that of family life.”—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Discover Great New Writers at Barnes & Noble
"Put ten photojournalists in front of a burning house, and I guarantee you'll get ten different pictures of that house. One...might choose...a wide shot of the whole fiery mess. Another might focus in on a single window, a singed teddy bear smoldering on its sill.... But this is...my story, my slide show, my burning house. Enter it knowing that, beyond a few name changes...every flame is real."

At 22 years of age, Harvard grad Deborah Copaken Kogan picked up her camera bag and headed overseas -- no, not to go backpacking in Europe but to cover a war. "I knew better than to be picky. Any war would do." She began by covering the intifadah, ingratiating herself "with any photographer I could find who had information about the day's planned demos, his own rental car, and a basket of leftover Danish." Her life on the road is a cocktail of volatile ingredients: "bombs exploding, young children crying, soldiers cowering, grimacing, dying." Add to that misery a mixture of easy sex with exotic men, accessible drugs, and lots of liquor, and you get the picture: a life on the road, worthy of a nod by Kerouac. But Deborah Kogan hasn't just casually recounted her wild and woolly days as an immature youth; she has offered a portrait of a recklessly lived life, a life she in some ways regrets, but one she couldn't imagine having lived otherwise. And in the telling of this life, she has laid herself bare -- her motives, her weaknesses, and her strengths, in a powerful, stirring memoir that leaves readers begging for more. (Winter 2001 Selection)

bn.com

...eloquent and well-observed, not only about the memoirist but about the world: war, death, photojournalism and, of course, the worldwide battle between the sexes.
— Washington Post

Liza Featherstone

Kogan loves men. She loves having sex with men, or, as she puts it in her tell-all book, she really, really loves "bedding" men. She'll do almost anything not to be alone or bored. She'll even pick up a camera if it means entree to cheap thrills, if it gives her license to enter worlds unlike the sleepy suburban one where she grew up. Frank, unapologetic and decidedly unpoetic, Kogan's memoir covers her years as a photojournalist, in seedy strip-tease joints, among drug addicts, in war-torn Afghanistan, in Bucharest, in a dizzying succession of beds. Each chapter but the last is titled for each era's most memorable lover, and Kogan's photojournalism itself seems entirely secondary, almost accidental, sprung not so much from passion or politics or even righteous artistic impulse as from a desire for titillation. "My true impetus for wanting to cover wars was, at its core, selfish," Kogan writes. "War was exciting, and I despised being bored." Readers looking for lyrical meditations or thoughtful reflections on the relationship between photography and event, media and message, art and truth won't find them here. What is here instead is the chatty, fast-paced, self-involved story of one woman's first thirty years—how she went from loving men in general to loving one man in particular, how she went from the "run-off-and-see-the-world adventure thing" to the desire to make babies with the very good man she finally marries.
—Beth Kephart

To pursue her dream to cover wars as a photojournalist, Kogan moved to Paris upon graduation from Harvard in 1988. Pretty and petite, with a sharp eye for good-looking, virile colleagues who, incidentally, could help her career, she embarked on a series of adventures that she breezily chronicles with a somewhat disingenuous na vet . Although her publisher compares her to Christiane Amanpour, readers may find more similarities with Candace Bushnell in these episodic vignettes describing both her far-flung assignments and intimate relationships with colleagues. She traveled with Pascal to Afghanistan and Pierre to Amsterdam; Julian helped her in Zimbabwe, but forbade further intimacies; Doru was with her in Romania. When she met Paul, her husband-to-be, Kogan's commitment to photojournalism waned: she blames her distaste on the wartime horrors she witnessed. Calling photojournalists vultures who feed on other people's misery, she conflates paparazzi with photojournalists, expressing disgust at their role in Princess Diana's fatal accident. Upon her return with Paul to the U.S., she began a new career as assistant producer for NBC's Dateline, which she eventually left to become a full-time mother. Kogan's swiftly paced story easily holds the reader's interest as she moves from her carefree days as an aspiring photojournalist to the responsibilities and dilemmas facing a working mother. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kogan graduated from college in 1988 and moved to Paris to find work as a photojournalist. Shutterbabe is an insightful account of what happened next. Divided into three sections, "Develop," "Stop," and "Fix," which are further divided into chapters--each named after a significant male in Kogan's life--the book centers around the author's adventurous travels, which offer a fascinating glimpse into the danger and excitement of observing wars and riots and the competition to take commercially appealing photographs. Kogan clearly describes the economic realities of photojournalism, the difficulty she had remaining removed from the tragedies she witnesses, how she adapted to a predominantly male profession, and the influence the presence of photographers can have on their subject. Her travels from Afghanistan to Romania reveal a life of excitement, danger, and self-awareness that is hard to put down. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/00.]--Alison Hopkins, Queens Borough P.L., Jamaica, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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