Overview
"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 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 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." "It is the saga of both her relationship with this Frenchman and her assignment in Afghanistan that fuels the first of Shutterbabe's six chapters, each covering a different corner of the globe and each ultimately linked to the man Kogan 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 her photographs were often splashed acrEditorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewShutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War is a fascinating coming-of-age memoir about former photojournalist Deborah Copaken Kogan's extraordinary experiences in some of the most dangerous, war-torn regions of the world. Born in the late '60s, Kogan grew up in the post-feminist era, firmly believing that she could pursue any career she wanted to. When she discovered the power and the thrill of photography as a high-spirited, intelligent undergrad at Harvard, she knew that she had found her calling; photojournalism promised the right balance of adrenaline-filled adventure and, idealistic though it may be, humanitarian effort. So, shortly after graduation, she set out in search of a war -- any war -- to expose the evils of the world, and soon she found herself on a bus with a group of Afghani freedom fighters during the pullout of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989.
And that is where Kogan's story begins. By book's end, she has documented a heroin epidemic in Switzerland, a racially charged conflict over rhino preservation in Zimbabwe, a distressingly inadequate orphanage in Romania, and -- the experience Kogan now remembers as the most frightening of all -- the violent demonstrations in Moscow during the fall of the Soviet Union. As she watches these events through the viewfinder of her camera, she witnesses a multitude of atrocities that profoundly affect both her inner character and her view of the world. Her descriptions of these experiences are full of compassion, youthful naïvité, and horrified disbelief.
But, despite the unorthodox nature of her job, there is an aspect of Kogan's professional life to which many working women will relate. At 5'-2", she is a far cry from the typical cowboy photojournalist, and professionally, she suffers a fair amount of harassment. Both in the offices of her photo agency and out in the field, many of Kogan's colleagues view her with suspicion. But as her story progresses through countries and conflicts, Kogan successfully surmounts these sexist obstacles, eventually earning the respect of her fellow photographers and proving that women can make outstanding photojournalists. Along the way, she matures as a person, and her stories become both increasingly poignant and enthralling.
And that's only half the story, for among the Swiss drug addicts and Romanian orphans Kogan also searches for a very different element of human nature: love. Each chapter of Shutterbabe covers not only a specific photo assignment but also a different man in her life, and her romantic escapades are just as exciting and potentially dangerous as the violent warfare she captures on film. From mean-spirited Pascal, who beats her with a telephone, to sweet but sad Doru, who carries Romania's burdens on his shoulders, Kogan's love life is turbulent and sexy, adding to the adventure. When she finally meets her future husband, her descriptions of their time together are touching, tender, and all the more meaningful after the slew of unsuitable Romeos who came before him.
By the final chapter, after a number of difficult decisions about the relative importance of career versus family (another dilemma that is sure to draw empathy from many working women), Kogan has demonstrated that, although the turf may be different, the search for love is often filled with as many minefields as war. Ultimately, her experiences in both types of battle make Kogan an inspirational role model for women and make Shutterbabe a thoroughly riveting read. (Stephanie Bowe)
Liza Featherstone
...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
From The Critics
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