"I knew I loved collecting men almost as much as I loved collecting photographs," she writes.
Our culture's great odes and luscious portraits have been, almost entirely, the work of men gazing at, touching and experiencing women.Īnd Kogan violates another cardinal rule: She doesn't want just one man. She celebrates the sensual in men-the way they smell, the texture of their skin, the shape of their bodies-with nonchalance and vigor, as if such descriptions were common. She remains unabashedly passionate about her lovers and fond of her male friends. What's perhaps most remarkable is that none of this sours Kogan on men. " `You should wear tighter clothes so we can actually see them.' " " `Deborah, you have such lovely little breasts,' " a colleague says one day, while Kogan is editing her photos of the intifadah. A bureaucrat tells her she can't cover a remote jungle conflict unless she sleeps with him. Her editors call her " `little girl.' " An ultra-Orthodox rabbi grabs her and sticks his tongue in her mouth in the middle of an interview in Jerusalem. She chats up strung-out heroin addicts (later, one of them breaks into her hotel room and stabs her) walks alone into an African jungle full of wild animals, poachers and bloodthirsty gamekeepers and lobbies her editors for the most challenging assignments.Īll the while she is striving for a fair shake in a world that treats women like children or sex objects. Photojournalism is highly competitive, and Kogan proves she's not just talented but exceptionally brave and aggressive. In Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, Israel, Switzerland and Paris, she is continually fighting two battles: one professional, one sexual. "A little girl gone woefully astray, trying to live her life like a man." "n the eyes of most of my colleagues, in the eyes even of some of my female friends, I was a freak," she writes. From her Harvard photography thesis, called "Shooting Back," to her confession that she likes carrying a camera because it feels "like a weapon" in her hands, Kogan sees her work-and her youthful existence-as deeply antagonistic to accepted cultural norms. But there is another reason for her attraction to combat. Kogan wants to cover wars, ostensibly because she doesn't like being bored. Kogan ends up with a convoy full of armed men somewhere in Afghanistan, swathed (like almost every Afghani woman) in endless folds of fabric that obscure her vision, dodging land mines and trying to change her tampon while squatting in the snow and balancing a Kalishnikov rifle on her shoulder. Welcome to war.' "Īs first assignments go, this one's not bad. Bienvenue a la guerre'-`Welcome to Peshawar.
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