Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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.

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.