Shutterbabe

Fresh out of college and passionate about photography, Deborah Copaken Kogan moved to Paris in 1988 and began knocking on photo agency doors, begging to be given a photojournalism assignment. Within weeks she was on the back of a truck in Afghanistan, the only womanand the only journalistin a convoy of mujahideen, the rebel "freedom fighters" at the time. She had traveled there with a handsome but dangerously unpredictable Frenchman, and the interwoven stories of their relationship and the assignment set the pace forShutterbabe's six chapters, each covering a different corner of the globe, each linked to a man in Kogan's life 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, seamlessly blending her personal battlessexism, battery, life-threatening dangerwith the historical oneswars, revolution, unfathomable sufferingit was her job to record.

Deborah Copaken Kogan worked as a photojournalist from 1988 to 1992, and her photographs appeared in <i>Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, L'Express, Liberation</i>, and <i>Géo</i>, among many other international newspapers and magazines. She spent the next six years in TV journalism, most recently as a producer for Dateline NBC. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.