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 woman--and the only journalist--in 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 for Shutterbabe'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 battles--sexism, battery, life-threatening danger--with the historical ones--wars, revolution, unfathomable suffering--it was her job to record.