Books to Buy

So here is some more on the books that I would like to buy this month. I will add more as time permits :)
This one is costing $32 at my favourite local bookstore. It will arrive next week.


Experiences in Afghanistan are photojournalist’s legacy
Art in form of comics fills in what happened between pictures.
By Douglas Wolk For

the Washington Post

Sunday, June 07, 2009

In 1986, the French photojournalist Didier Lefevre joined a Doctors Without Borders mission to Afghanistan. It was a dangerous place even then —- a country where the Cold War had turned viciously hot after the Soviet invasion of 1979. Lefevre stayed only a few months, but beset by disease, brutal weather and extortionist police, he barely survived the experience. Still, he brought back 4,000 photographs from his trip and returned to Afghanistan seven more times before his death in 2007.

Originally published in three French volumes between 2003 and 2006, “The Photographer” is a riveting account of Lefevre’s first journey and his experiences in Zaragandara, the Afghan town where Doctors Without Borders set up a makeshift hospital. Lefevre’s blisteringly forceful black-and-white photographs, and sometimes his contact sheets, appear on nearly every page of the book. So does Emmanuel Guibert’s artwork. The cartoonist adapted his friend’s memories of the trip into comics form, filling in the spaces between photos with sequences that bind the story together (and providing, understandably, almost every image we see of Lefevre himself) and explain what was happening at less photogenic moments.

Guibert develops a new visual style for each project he draws: He’s also the artist behind last year’s “Alan’s War,” another superb piece of oral history in comics form. Here his approach is rough and blobby, clearly modeled on the contours of photographs but sparely rendered and showing spatters of ink. Seen next to Lefevre’s finely shaded photos, Guibert’s idiomatic line work emphasizes that what we’re seeing in the comics sections of “The Photographer” isn’t quite real: It’s history recollected and reconstructed.

Sometimes, the precision and emotional wallop of Lefevre’s photographs cut more deeply than words or drawings could: There’s a nearly unbearable sequence of a wounded child having her burn cleaned, and remarkable images of a couple of Afghan soldiers laughing about their injuries and of a local chief posing with a gun and some plastic flowers.

But this is as much the show of Guibert and colorist/designer Frederic Lemercier as it is Lefevre’s, particularly in the book’s final third, which concerns the photographer’s disastrous solo journey back from Zaragandara as he was running out of film. The artists take over altogether for a long, dramatic sequence in which Lefevre and his horse, abandoned by their escorts, struggle up a mountain in a blizzard as the sky darkens. For a few pages, Guibert’s scratchy renderings are half-obliterated by patches of white; then all we see are spotty silhouettes against a darkening green background for a few pages, until Lefevre abandons hope and pulls out his camera.