To fate:

Thank you for the French, who give me cheese, wine, and tortoiseshell glasses. Anything said in that lush, throaty cchha shjaamelouie froish chelie moi cherie accent is automatically more, well, more. Even listening to Nicolas Sarkozy giving a speech to the French congress about American imperialism sends me into fits of daydream.

So when you/God/Buddha left The Photographer: Into War Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders on my doorstep, cleverly disguised by a cardboard Amazon box, and when I saw the names on its cover (Didier Lefèvre, Emmanuel Guibert, Frédéric Lemercier), I was prepared to love it even if it was terrible. But it’s not.

My fetish for all things French is an inappropriate way to open this letter, since The Photographer is not about France or cheese or anything heavenly. It is about war, foreign aid, photography, and the limits of human endurance. Still, though, it feels important to begin with my fetish. Let me explain.

Interweaving illustrations and photographs, as this book does, moves me between fantasy and reality in a way that emphasizes both the “truth” of the photos and the “story” in the illustrations – not that those two don’t overlap- they do, which is part of the brilliance of the pairing. Because they are juxtaposed in this way, I am forced into comparing the ways in which these two mediums communicate. I am constantly reminded that what I experienced as “story” (because of the drawings) has actually happened (because of the photographs), which in turn makes me see myself as alternately a voyuer, consumer, and then witness to a human experience so far from the leftover Chili’s I just ate for lunch.

Very heady, and very cool, especially because this juxtaposition forces me to confront the way that I consume information about global events, i.e. America’s current relationship with Afghanistan.

Back in 1986, Didier (who is referred to by his first name in the introduction), the narrator and hero of this book, spent three months in Afghanistan and Pakistan photographing an expedition of Doctors Without Borders. After he survived the mountaintop and returned to France, a French magazine published a two-page spread on his story. Until 2002, when Voyages en Afghanistan (a book of his pictures designed by Lemercier, that story was the only published evidence of his journey. In 2003, the gaps between photos were illustrated by his friend Emmanuel Guibert, and put together in a book designed by Lemericier and published in France, but Alexis Siegel didn’t translate Le Photographe into English until 2009.

The book is visually intense, like the photos of outdoor surgery in the middle of the night or of the sixteen year old whose jaw has been ripped off by a piece of shrapnel. These moments are where the juxtaposition of photographs and illustrations is most intense – I examine the photograph of the wounded boy’s face, and in the next moment, a drawing of Didier falling asleep.

What impressed me more than photographs of gaping wounds, however, was the emotionally intensity of this graphic novel. When Didier, lost and near death, unclenches his frozen fingers enough to photograph his horse against a foggy Afghan mountaintop to “let people know where I died,” I understand the magnitude of his experience.

The other cool thing that this book does is extend the already unique ways that graphic narrative plays with time. Graphic narrative is easier and faster to digest. Because of this, graphic artists have the ability to spend more time in a moment than would be possible with prose, where long descriptions of paint peeling are tedious. Do you lose meaning by digesting images quickly? Maybe specific meaning – the meaning prescribed by an author -- but even though the reader of graphic fiction is moving quickly, they are still taking in those delicate or painful moments that need to be slowed down, but aren’t explicitly defined. Take the 12 frames in The Photographer that document a French doctor brushing her hair in the morning. As a reader I experience both the time passing inside each frame and, without being directed by language, the time that passes between frames. I “see” Didier adjusting his exposure or reframing the shot, I hear the click of his shutter. Suddenly a single sentence- “Juliette is making herself pretty for the climb up the pojol,” has the weight of real experience.

Readers of graphic narrative forget that they are reading. This is an advantage of all story-telling mediums – we are allowed to escape into fantasy, or in the case of non-fiction, other people’s lives. So, like the illustrations and photographs, both my fantasy about France and the real France can co-exist. In fact, one illuminates the other.

Skeptics of the graphic novel’s ability to be “literary” should read this book, because it is graphic narrative’s answer to Clement Greenberg’s famous essay Modernist Painting, which calls for painting to justify its own existence. In short, for painters to use paint to do what other mediums cannot.

Lemercier, Guibert, and Didier use this unique combination of drawings, photographs, and language to remind us that we are forgetting - forgetting about the act of reading, but also about the reasons we tell stories: to escape, but also to remember.

Best,

Claire Stephens