Required Reading for Mr. Obama: The Photographer: into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders
The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
by Emmanuel Guibert (drawings), Didier Lefèvre (photographs), Frédéric Lemercier (layout / design)
Translated from the French by Alexis Siegel
FirstSecond Books, 2009. 267 pages.
After reading The Photographer you will want to become one of two things: (1) a doctor; or (2) a pacifist. You will not, in all likelihood, wish to become a photographer.
The Photographer chronicles the harrowing journey of a photojournalist who accompanies a group of doctors into Afghanistan. It is the mid-1980s, and the Soviet Union is engaged in a protracted war against Afghani resistance fighters in a hot zone of the Cold War. The U.S. is covertly funding the mujahideen to weaken the Soviet Union’s military. Humanitarian missions can only travel at their own risk.
Doctors Without Borders — then relatively unknown in the U.S. — hires photographer Didier Lefèvre to document the organization’s mission to establish field hospitals in the remote hamlets of Teshkan and Yeftal. To succeed, they must climb mountain passes teeming with wolves, hike through valleys controlled by drug runners, and navigate the fractious politics of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Somehow Lefèvre survives, and leaves yearning to do it all over again.
