As a literary theme, "adventures in love and war" is a timeless subject, allowing infinite variations, fascinating nexus of extremes in human relations, and life's game of chance.
Alas, "Shutterbabe" does not risk belonging to the best of this genre.
I wouldn't hold against the author her boasting of sexual exploits, never missing an attempt to seduce surrounding men from their girlfriends, or even for naming chapters after her casual lovers. All this can add spice and fullness to the narrative. The problem is that there is little else beside self-absorbed chatter, looking more like a reminiscence of a romp during an extended spring break vacation than a credible journalistic work.
As a young girl just out of college, she was expected at first to know little about the places she planned to visit. But it almost seems she makes a point of deliberately staying clueless throughout her travels. In Zimbabwe, where she went specifically to see elephant poachers being hunted down by special military squads, she find herself totally unprepared in the middle of nowhere, until being rescued by Australian soldiers. May be if she wasn't so busy sleeping with other women's boyfriends, she could at least learn something about the regional geography and what to put in her backpack.
Her version of feminism, expounded at length throughout the book, sounds more like a trivial egotism rather than a principled position. She expects as a given support, comfort and sex from men she encounters when she needs it, but is never too long to resort to petulant tirades in the "male chauvinist pigs" fashion whenever things turn out not exactly to her liking.
Deborah Copaken Cogan describes her brief - less than four years - career as a photojournalist in miscellaneous messy spots around the globe. She offers no shortage of sentiments about making it in a "notoriously macho", male-dominated world of adventure and war photography, but one is left with doubt whether she was really trying.
She started to seek adventures at the end of her Harvard years in readily available and marginally thrilling places, such as the "Combat Zone" - puritanical Boston's puny version of a red-light district, with drug addicts, pimps and flashers. Then In February 1989 she goes abroad to war-torn Afghanistan hoping to "... 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".
Apparently, nobody told her that Soviet Army was practically withdrawn by that time. Russians didn't blast the mountain slopes with artillery shells - various bands of mujaheds did it to each other. No Mi-24 helicopters swooping down the valley to destroy rebel convoys and guerillas shooting them out of the sky with "Stingers". Instead we are treated with war stories about crushed packs of tampons and passing Tic-Tacs as medicine to dirt-covered children. She makes herself a nuisance to her hosts because of their strict privacy customs, resulting in one rebel soldier getting his legs blown off by a mine when checking a pathway for her so she could go pee off the road.
D. Copaken is genuinely surprised that these Stinger-supplied rebels often shout "Down with America!" while perpetually cleaning their AK-47. Oh, she must have thought all they wanted to do was go to the Disney World, if only Soviet troops just let them.
One of the persistent impressions throughout the book is how little empathy she feels towards the objects she seeks with her camera. Her only human interest is some thrills for herself and another photo opportunity for her career. In Zimbabwe the author finally got her lens on a freshly killed (almost by her request) poacher - an unlucky fellow probably just trying to feed his family, and now left to rot in the jungles. In her own words she "descended on him like a vulture" for the best photo shot. When finding herself in one of the Romania's worst orphanages, for the most crippled and deformed children, she descends into shrilly hysterics - not because she feels anything for these kids, but because hideous surroundings offend her aesthetic comfort.
Later, in Moscow, in the midst of the August 1991 coup the author encounters a crowd of protesters carrying anti-coup slogans, written in Russian. She then seriously advises the carrier of one banner to rewrite the slogan in English instead - otherwise what's the point of the whole thing if cameras of western reporters would not be attracted to some familiar words. Is she for real? From somebody who has been around the world, one could expect a bit more sophistication than this uniquely American form of solipsism - that things aren't happening unless they are on CNN. Not from this girl - throughout the book she seems to make a point of firmly sticking to the flattest of media stereotypes.
Incidentally, I've recently read a better work of reporting and memoirs involving love, sex, adventure and war, by a Russian journalist Daria Aslamova (some excerpts available at www.aslamova.df.ru) in her "Adventures of a bad girl" series. She describes her experience from countless flings in the university dormitory to liaisons with celebrities and politicians and to wars in Caucasus, Nagorny Karabakh and the former Yugoslavia. Once she was captured and raped at a gunpoint by a militant of one warring side - a condition for sparing the lives of her companions, captured together. From love and lust to danger and death, she covered it with far more warmth, wit, and vigor than the author of the "Shutterbabe". Interestingly, judging by the descriptions in both books of the coup in Moscow, she and D. Copaken Kogan could be within a few feet from each other during the decisive night of August 20, 1991. Game of chance can produce interesting patterns, indeed.
