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"Shutterbabe"
By Deborah Copaken Kogan
Villard, 297 pp. $24.95
"Instinctively, I grab my camera and start shooting, crouching and circling in a small orbit around the dead man, trying to get the best angle so that the bullet holes feature prominently in the frame. I circle the body again, my movements like a feverish waltz - circumnavigating, twirling, whirling, spinning around and around.

"I am a vulture. I don't even try to pretend otherwise."

This is how Deborah Copaken Kogan reacted when she saw the corpse of an ivory poacher in Africa during an assignment to find dead poachers. Her new book, "Shutterbabe," is chockfull of passages equally striking and evocative, and equally devastatingly frank about herself and her profession.

"Shutterbabe" is a memoir (with some of her work reproduced) of her days as a female photojournalist in a predominantly male - and macho - field where boasts of dead bodies seen and bombs survived lend as much esteem as the number of awards and exhibitions earned. And it captures why she was so enamored of photography, and what led her on her career path.

"I loved to go out and shoot in strange places, to talk to the types of people I'd never meet were it not for the excuse of the camera," she writes. "I loved the heft of the black metal in my hands, the way it felt like a weapon. I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangles rife with metaphor. I loved to collect the rectangles, like so many souvenir trinkets, to gaze at them, study them, find the one that best summarized a particular lived moment."

Anyone who is serious about photography will understand this passage deep in her soul; anyone who is not can easily identify with it. Anyone who knows something of the art of photography and its major architects - names such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank - will connect viscerally with the author; readers who are new to photography or journalism will still feel her enthusiasm.

The book follows Copaken Kogan fresh out of Harvard to Paris, where she lives during the 1980s and early 1990s, and elbows her way into the fraternity that flies off to flirt with wars in behalf of agencies such as Gamma, Sipa and Magnum. She writes unflinchingly and with clearly recalled details about her major assignments: Riding with the rebels in Afghanistan, seeking out drug addicts in the Netherlands and a drug park in Switzerland, tracking poachers in Zimbabwe, witnessing the fall of Communist Romania (and bringing to light the horrible conditions of orphans with disabilities there), and getting caught in the terror of the end of Gorbachev's Glasnost era in Russia. The book closes with Kopaken Kogan's switch from still photography to work as a television news producer, and the reasons for her career jump.

"Shutterbabe" flows wonderfully through her life adventures, using not just her exotic and exciting work as the milestones along the way, but also the particular men in her life that she associates with each adventure.

Although at times it seems like a plot device to add more narrative to the book (as if it needs more oomph), the sexual journal is both endearing in a way and a disappointment in others. Mostly, she makes the point that as a sexually very active woman, she is living the life that is common and often accepted for men. She doesn't seem to understand that male philandering isn't necessarily acceptable behavior either, but she does get around to telling readers why she is so aggressive about her sexuality, and her life as a sexual gadabout ends when she finds her husband-to-be and settles down to domestic and maternal bliss instead of risking her life around the globe.

"I did it because I was searching for myself amidst the mayhem," she admits midway into the book.

"The only way I could describe this impulse to people who claimed not to understand it was to equate it to the one thing we humans all understand: sex. As with arousal, where the pulse pounds at the thrill, anticipation, and yes, even the danger of exploring a new body, a new mind, each new story I covered fulfilled a pressing inner need to feel that same ardor, to inhale the world and all it had to offer, regardless of the risk from self-exposure."

On the other hand, she's blasé about her dalliances and youthful disinterest in commitment. "Men are like books, to be read or skimmed, studied or forgotten, enjoyed for the moment or digested in a forever kind of way. A few go back on the shelf and gather dust, others I might pull out now and again to reread a passage or two or three or fifteen."

Such dimestore therapy makes for some entertaining insights, but it's a bit frustrating when Copaken Kogan's so truly intuitively intelligent about so much else in her life.

She gets downright mushy when she get to Paul, her husband-to-be. "As we made our way across the Pont Neuf, holding hands first tentatively, then as tight as our intertwined fingers would allow, for the first time in my short life I could actually begin to imagine what a happy ending might look like."

Her emotional immaturity comes a letdown after such searing insights into the art, craft and phoniness of photojournalism and the human condition her career revealed to her.

When she's on a roll, though, Copaken Kogan's a terrific, conversational writer with a flair - not surprisingly -- for capturing images: "… the night has a magical, anticipatory feel to it, like an orchestra warming up," she writes of an evening in Africa as she prepares for her poacher trip.

And in one of the book's most affecting chapters, when she stumbles upon the plight of Romanian orphans, and witnesses the awful autopsy of a young boy, she compares herself with a camera. "The brain, unlike a roll of film, seems to have an infinite capacity to record, and, even worse, recall. Especially the more shocking images. It would be so much easier if, after every thirty-six gruesome frames, I could toss it out and replace it with a fresh brain. That way I wouldn't have to remember or interpret, for the rest of my life, the faceless, disemboweled dead boy with the heart ripped out of his chest."

Writing like this made "Shutterbabe" ripper of a read. But I'd love to hear her thoughts on it years from now, and see if she would have put less of an emphasis on her sexuality, and minimized the role her men played on her photography.

I doubt a different approach could have hurt the story.

This review was published in the Rocky Mountain News, December 2000.