Customer Reviews

Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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.

I really don't understand all these glowing reviews. The small blurb in the "New Yorker" had this about right---something to the effect that there is little value in a memoir exhibiting self-obsession without self-awareness. Imagine that this was written by a male photo-journalist, and entitled, say, "Photostud." The narrator brags about his numerous "conquests" and "seductions" and writes in detail about the number of women he beds while covering exciting wars in exotic far-off places. He informs the reader that in college he "practically majored in the sport (of seduction)." He names his chapters not after the locations they purport to be about, but after the women with whom he is having sex at the time. He prides himself in the fact that he is able to seduce women with live-in boyfriends, but draws the line at married women. This would generate ridicule, at best, in the unlikely event it was even published, but this in reverse is what Ms. Kogan presents to us as an account of her relatively short career as a photojournalist. I was initially interested in the book as a feminist viewpoint on a notoriously male-dominated profession, but here the emphasis is definitely on the "babe" and not the journalist. The author ventures to Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Romania and the USSR without the faintest notion of the politics, culture, history, or language of the countries she visits, and worse, seems proud of it. One comes from this book without any sense of where she stands on the issues behind the news events she photographs, and convinced that she could not care less about the people or places she visits, except for the men she beds. For example, in Afghanistan, she is led off the beaten track to pee by a nameless mujahideen, who steps on a mine and has his leg almost blown off. It has to be amputated. A few pages later, here is the author describing Afghanistan to a guy she hopes to seduce: "You want to know why Afghanistan was so horrible? There was this guy..." She's not talking about the permanently maimed soldier, but about a creepy and violent French journalist whom she accompanied to the country, and who not surprisingly soon betrays her and everyone else in sight in short order. She is so ill-informed that she travels to Zimbabwe expecting to cover a war, which turns out to be a local action against some game poachers. When she succeeds in getting a photo of a killed poacher, he is treated as merely a photo opportunity, without any reflection on how the economic conditions there force these hard choices. This has got to be the most comically and infuriatingly self-absorbed narrator since "Pale Fire"'s Charles Kinbote. The last fifty pages or so, when she ditches journalism for the bliss of married life and motherhood, should come with a high sugar content warning. As one might expect, the prose style throughout is on the level of a badly-written high-school confessional. I'm glad I picked this one up at the library.

This book is an easy, entertaining read. I noted in the other reviews that the book is either loved or hated, and many of the negative reviews mention her sexual promiscuity as a point of criticism. Too bad--I found it refreshing that she was both honest and unapologetic, and she actually doesn't go into detail in describing any of the encounters.

What frustrated me is Kogan's complete lack of explanation (or perspective?) in the cultural ethnocentrism with which almost all of her foreign interactions take place. Presenting herself as a role model, I felt that she should explain or even just mention how inappropriate her expectations within cultures other than her own really were. A prime example of this is the section in which she becomes tired of wearing a burka in Afghanistan and demands to be dressed as a man (taking protective clothing from the people on whom she is completely dependent), although she assumes none of the cultural responsibilities associated with the male gender role and, in fact, a man loses his leg performing his very male duty of checking for landmines, so that she can urinate. What a beautiful example of American, cultural grace overseas.

My other complaint is the unending vanity and self-promotion, the inclusion of every single award and honorable mention to her credit, every unsolicited glance or comment related to her appearance, the pretentious name-dropping and endless mention of her Harvard education. Conversely, there was very little recognition of the people who supported and loved her, such as her family and little detail relating to the people with whom she interacted, except in how their comments affected her directly.

Lastly, I found it somewhat ironic that, as such a self-pronounced revolutionary, she ends up quitting work to be with her children. I would find this honorable, if she didn't actually quit in order to pay some, poor immigrant to raise them, while she hangs out in Starbucks writing. Perhaps this is what you call an ivy league revolution.

I think that this book could have been so much better with a bit more self-deprecation, grace and humor. Who knows? If she continues to write, maybe she'll gain persepctive.

This book is far from being a typical account by a photojournalist of her experiences - and that's quite unfortunate especially given the interesting locations where the author worked. To be blunt, this book is a poorly written combination of a tawdry romance novel and a mediocre travel-log.

What disappointed me most is that while Kogan traveled to places like the Israel, Afghanistan, Romania and Africa all while major news events were occurring, she spends little time discussing the political situation and her craft. Rather, in the first two thirds of the text, in practically every few pages she describes her very frequent sexual encounters with a series of different men she just met in more far detail than necessary. One of these worth mentioning is that after describing her lastest fling, she writes of how her next assignment is to photograph IV drug users for a story about AIDS. Quite a transition. But does she get it?? In addition, she spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the poor living and hygenic conditions during her assignments rather than the subject matter.

Perhaps more disturbing is that while Kogan is doing her best to portray herself as a very driven liberated feminist, she also details several instances of being seriously beaten and/or date-raped by men she is involved with, inaddition to frequent instances of verbal abuse by her employers. Yet she stays with them. She seems to miss the point completely.

It appears that Kogan wrote this book mainly as therapy to purge her memory of past mistakes. After recently reading The Bang Bang Club, an excellent account of photojournalists in South Africa, this book is a real disappointment. If your looking for a good account of photojournalism, this is not it.

I'm not sure what audience this book was aimed at; I never figured out where it was trying to go.

I could sum the whole thing up like this:

Through very bad judgement, promiscuous white-bread chick gets into hairy situations as a photojournalist, and into stupid situations with men.

Then she writes a whiny book about it.

The End.

Seriously; if you pick up an autobiography, the author owes it to the reader to have something interesting to say. Or so I thought. In this case the writer, Deborah Copaken Kogan, seems to have mistaken what might interest her girl friends with what would interest the general public. This book is like College Writing 101. Sleeping with lame guys and getting into a handful of dangerous situations doesn't make for interesting reading. The sad thing is that every potentially interesting topic gets sidetracked to make her look like the victim and/or 'cool' . For example, if you follow a bunch of Mujahedeen around in Afghanistan, I think the average reader would want a little more historical and cultural background on that conflict and less "Please feel sorry for me; I haven't bathed in a month and I'm out of tampons". Her "It's-all-about-me" american tourist worldview get's really boring really quick.

As for the art of photojournalism; don't expect to learn more about photography than you would taking a class at the local community college (Leica's are expensive? Really?)

And the sleeping around? I, as a male reader, could care less who a woman sleeps with, but jumping in the sack with obvious A-holes and then expecting sympathy from the reader when she finally wises up is pathetic. Trying to portray this as somehow 'liberated' or 'feminist' is so White Suburban it's laughable.

The one thing that could have done a lot to save this book is MORE PHOTOGRAPHS. Even in the hardcover, there's just small, b/w images.

I liked the 'idea' of this book, but I think it just failed on all counts because the subject herself is so uninteresting.

I really wanted to like this book, afterall I'm a photographer with no extra cash and I plopped down full price for the hardcover. Yet even with my free spirited tendancies, I have to admit I have a problem with a memoir where most of the chapter headings are named after the author's casual sexual conquests. I know she's trying to be a guy. She admits that freely. Still, she's supposedly a serious photographer yet there are only a handful of pictures in the book, and even those are mediocre. So what's the point? What's the message to other young women trying to find their way with a camera? And how did she make the drastic change from obsessive adventurer to stay-at-home mom? Yes, the book is self-referrential and narcissistic yet there is little believable emotional exploration here. Maybe taking baby portraits will suit her better. Maybe then she will grow a heart and soul and have something important to say.

This very unusual book is fascinating whether you are interested in pursuing a career in journalism or just curious about what life is like as a woman covering war for a living. This "Shutterbabe" tells the story of her life from behind the camera across different battle zones around the globe. She also tells of the men she meets and gets involved with. There has been some criticism of the book for these tales of sexual escapades, but this is the raw story of a real person's life, and I think that they reflect a complete story, instead of one massaged to make the author look better.

My only disappointment with the story is that she finally gives it all up for motherhood, but that is real life too. Before that, Kogan was a producer for "Dateline" on NBC after her return to the United States. She speaks of tiring of wartime weariness and equates photojournalists to vultures who prey on others' misery--all of which I find disingenuous for someone who made her own living this way for many years. It's ok to change your mind, but I believe that photojournalism is an important way of bringing news to people, and I think Kogan would agree or she would have pursued another way of making a living with her camera in the first place.

Despite these claims, I highly recommend this book to everyone, particularly young women interested in journalism. This book is a real insider's look at covering war, from a woman's point of view, something (unfortunately) we still don't hear that much of, even in the 21st century. Don't miss it.

This is purportedly a book about photojournalism, but it is really more about the the author's sex life and how wonderful she thinks she is. She mentions at every opportunity that she went to Harvard, mentions every single prize or award she has won, mentions every glance any man makes at her. I wanted to read about photojournalism and when Kogan does talk about cameras, photo agencies, being a woman amid mainly men, etc., I was intrigued and wanted to know more. I didn't want to hear about her sleeping with almost every guy she meets. It's clear that Kogan is sharp and is writing for purely commercial purposes-- writing a book with lots of sex in it will be a much bigger seller than one strictly about photojournalism. For those who want a book on photojournalism, read something else. For those who want to read about a young woman's narcissism, this is a good primer.

shutterbabe is a true abomination. it's not simply that the author has no real story to tell beyond the ambitious and loveless sex that defined her twenties. it's that she can't write. the prose here is breathless and Valley Girl vapid. there's not a single memorable line. the poorness of the prose is particularly painful and noticeable in light of the author's frequent, grating boasts about her own superior intelligence. moreover, shutterbabe is astonishingly devoid of wisdom, growth, insight. kogan's deepest philosophical musings sound like this: "Then there's the whole Holocaust thing. As far as our reasoning goes, two Jews who get married have a moral responsibility to populate the world with more Jews." my guess is that there is more to parenting than that.

Deborah Copaken Kogan's striking memoir distills all that I find troubling about photojournalism, and vapid and superficial about television news. If Kogan's book were just a wisecracking look at her time in the photo trenches, it would make a fun, if insignificant, read. What sets her book apart is her sometimes painful self-knowledge (she took risks in coverage and relationships that nearly always came back to bite her) as well as her clear-eyed perception that the news business can be as cruel, insensitive and shallow as it can be exhilarating, significant and informative. As someone who has been lucky enough to have been both a professional photographer as well as a newspaper reporter, I appreciate what she is saying. ---Frank Van Riper, photography columnist, <Washingtonpost.com>