Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “Where are you going? Let me come with you,” Pierre says, momentarily grabbing my hand then self-consciously letting it drop.

  “I’m going to go find some junkies,” I say, paying the café bill in full and heading out the door. Pierre tries to split the tab, but I shove his hand out of the way. “I’m not going to let this trip be a total waste of time and money.” If the pictures of the boarded-up house aren’t going to sell, which I’m sure they won’t, I figure I can at least shoot some useful stock images. The royalty checks from pictures I shot a few months earlier of heroin addicts in Switzerland have been rolling in unabated, allowing me to pay my rent every month, keeping my dreams alive.

  But even better than the money I’ve earned from them, my junkie pictures have suddenly turned me into a “concerned” photographer in the eyes of some of my colleagues. When Patrick Zachmann, a Magnum photographer, saw an exhibit of them included in my show at the first annual Perpignan photojournalism festival, he showed up at my hotel room and approached me about joining his agency. When he spoke the words out loud—“Have you ever considered joining Magnum?”—I found it difficult to breathe. Have I ever considered it? I thought. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted since the day I picked up a camera.

  “Sure, I’ve considered it,” I said.

  Patrick told me I had exactly one year until the next Magnum election. He urged me to build up my portfolio, shoot more drug stories, more wars, more everything. He told me I had an eye, a vision, and he said he was fairly certain I had what it takes to be a “concerned” photographer.

  I blushed at the compliment, but I wasn’t convinced. Concerned photographer? What exactly did that mean? I once read that Nick Ut, after shooting his famous photo, took that naked, napalm-covered Vietnamese girl to the hospital himself, saving her life. I liked to think I would have done the same thing in his position, but I couldn’t really say for sure.

  During the weeklong festival in Perpignan, I was interviewed by a number of French radio, television and newspaper journalists. They all wanted to know why I did it, why I ventured into the types of places and situations I chose to photograph. Unfortunately, my French was not yet up to par, and it just seemed easier to answer “Oui” to their complicated questions. “Is it because you see drug addiction as a scourge to our cities, but yet you sympathize with the addicts?”

  “Oui.”

  “Are you absolutely horrified by the destruction wrought upon the Afghani people by the Soviet Union?”

  “Oui.”

  “Do you choose to shoot horrific places and situations to make us uncomfortable, to alert us to the wretched injustices of the world?”

  “Oui.”

  It wasn’t that I was lying. I did see drug addiction as a scourge, I did sympathize with the addicts, I was horrified by what I saw in Afghanistan and I did like making people feel uncomfortable with my pictures. But that wasn’t the main reason why I did it. I did it because those things—drugs, wars, whatever—were there. I did it because I was curious, because I was young and I was hopeful, because it was exciting, because I enjoyed it, because I wanted to, because sometimes I felt like I had to, because I figured if we all have just one life to live, I might as well fill mine with interesting stuff. Adventures.

  I did it because I was searching for myself amidst the mayhem.

  The only way I could describe this impulse to people who claimed not to understand it was to equate it to the one thing we humans all understand: sex. As with arousal, where the pulse pounds at the thrill, anticipation, and yes, even the danger of exploring a new body, a new mind, each new story I covered fulfilled a pressing inner need to feel that same ardor, to inhale the world and all it had to offer, regardless of the risk from self-exposure.

  Photography was my transformative phone booth. With a couple of cameras hung around my neck, I was no longer the tiny, mild-mannered homecoming queen from suburban Potomac. I was a superhero, a leaper of small land mines in a single bound; invincible. I was, now don’t laugh . . . Shutterbabe!

  But was I a concerned photographer? Let’s just say I had my doubts.

  Walking out of the café I turn to Pierre. “Will you be joining me?” I ask him.

  Pierre looks confused, but he follows me anyway. “How are you going to find junkies? How do you even know what they look like?” he asks, walking briskly to keep up with me. I have short legs, but I’ve always been a speed walker. A compensation thing, I’m sure.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell Pierre. “Like I said, I’m usually pretty good at finding them.”

  While we were getting stoned, I told Pierre about the junkie I found in the Paris Métro, the one I followed into one of those self-cleaning public street toilets just off the Place de la République. He needed his fix, so he paid his two francs, the door slid open, we slid inside, and for the next twenty minutes I stood on the immaculately clean toilet seat shooting photos of him getting high. An odd arrangement, yes, and kind of stupid in retrospect, but the guy seemed happy enough just to have the company. Anyway, I needed more drug pictures for my Magnum application, and I had nothing better to do that evening either.

  Pierre, in turn, told me that this trip to Arnhem would be his first foray into a story involving real live human beings. Pierre had joined the Sipa photo agency on the strength of his animal pictures. He’d spent a couple of months in Morocco with a falcon breeder, and he traveled all over Canada shooting pictures of wolves.

  As he spoke, I couldn’t help but think that it takes a certain type of disposition to sit all day long in the snow, patiently waiting for wolves. And quite another to follow a junkie into an enclosed public pissoir.

  Ah, the variety of the human animal.

  We must have lost track of time in the hash café because it’s getting dark by the time we head out. After a couple of loops around the neighborhood, I suggest we get some sleep and try again tomorrow. Besides, we’re too stoned to keep looking. As it is, we barely find our way back to the train station to reclaim our bags. And now we still have to find a place to spend the night.

  Pierre offers to carry my overnight bag while we look for lodging, and this time I accept his assistance. The two hotels across the street from the station are all booked, but the concierge at the second one gives us a tip on another, which we find and check into. Our rooms are clean and cheap: perfectly acceptable. Sure, there’s no CNN, the bathroom is minuscule, the carpet is worn and the bedspread is made out of something really scratchy and synthetic, but that’s okay. Those things are all incidental. Out of the four possible permutations of the two most important attributes, cost and cleanliness—1) dirty and cheap, 2) clean and expensive, 3) dirty and expensive or 4) clean and cheap—we’ve hit the jackpot.

  I’ve always found it helpful to keep my requirements for satisfaction to a minimum: fewer basic needs equals greater contentment; the fewer variables you concern yourself with, the less chance you have for disappointment. In fact, when you look at the pure math, it’s amazing to see to what degree the odds start stacking up against you as the number of variables increases.

  (The equation, should you have some spare time, is fairly simple: n2 - n + 2 = x, where n stands for the number of variables and x equals the number of possible outcomes. Two variables give you four possible outcomes; three give you eight; four give you fourteen, etc.)

  Here’s the rub. These elementary laws of probability apply to love as well. In fact, when you look at the math, when you think about all the variables each of us requires in our ideal of a mate, it’s nothing short of a miracle that two people might find each other amidst the morass of humanity and actually fall in love. The heart might be fooled for a short while (lust clouds the mind), but numbers never lie. Statistically speaking, true love is extremely rare.

  At the age of twenty-three, though I’ve had many boyfriends and lovers, many of whom I’ve love
d, I’ve only been in love—the kind of love where you can project into the future and see yourselves growing old together, the kind of love that makes walking feel like floating, smiling feel like bursting, touching feel like free falling—exactly twice.

  Both relationships, one in high school, the other in college, ended in tears. Gabe and I were never the same after the abortion. And Matthew, at some point, although I was never sure exactly when, simply stopped loving me back. Or maybe he never really loved me at all.

  And so I content myself with fewer variables. I make do with the less messy, less entangled, less heartbreaking act of loving without being in love. What can I say? I love men, all varieties. Men are like books, to be read or skimmed, studied or forgotten, enjoyed for the moment or digested in a forever kind of way. A few go back on the shelf and gather dust, others I might pull out now and again to reread a passage or two or three or fifteen. What I mean is that they can’t all be Anna Karenina, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy them just the same. I love talking to men and listening to their life stories. I love smelling them and holding them and making love to them, because, really, this is the most pure, metaphysical form of communication I know. I love their idiosyncrasies—this one likes his thighs caressed on the inside, not the outside; that one fixes me a plate of scrambled eggs after each assignation; this one is haunted by dreams of nuclear holocaust; that one has a thing about Dylan Thomas and earlobes. And just as each book I read changes me in some small, or perhaps large way, each man I bed, to be perfectly hyperbolic, makes me feel that much more attuned to the transcendence and bounty and beauty of life.

  And so when, a few minutes after arriving in my clean and cheap hotel room, Pierre knocks on the door and asks me if he can borrow some soap, even though he hasn’t read a book since high school, even though he believes dogs are smarter than people and that the greatest philosopher of all time is Jim Morrison and that astrology is a more reliable science than, say, physics, I invite him inside. Pierre is kind. And attractive. He makes me laugh. What more do I need?

  Later in bed, after an extremely satisfying romp, Pierre is kissing his way down the length of my right arm, muttering, “Merci,” after each kiss, when he suddenly stops. “What’s this?” he asks, running his fingers along a faint white scar.

  “It’s a long story,” I say.

  “So tell me,” he says. He clutches my naked body close to his and nuzzles the back of my head. I feel like a security blanket, only better.

  FOUR MONTHS EARLIER, in the spring of 1989, the Swiss government decided to set up a free needle exchange program in the Platzpitz, a verdant park in the center of Zurich. The idea was to curb the spread of AIDS, but the result was a rollicking heroin circus. The park—bordered on one side by a river, on the other side by chocolate boutiques, watch stores, banks and quaint cobbled streets sprouting well-dressed Swiss matrons pushing prams full of blond babies—had suddenly become a netherworld of ravaged bodies slumped into little puddles of heroin-dazed goo. Virtually every junkie in Europe had heard about the Platzpitz, and they had all come to stay.

  But no one was getting any good pictures of the place. All of the European magazines were planning their own needle park stories, but none of the photographers sent out to shoot the Platzpitz were coming back with anything worth publishing. A few Italian war photographers had staked themselves out with a couple of telephoto lenses in the window of a museum that bordered the park, but covering the heroin beat is not like covering a war. Bombs still look like bombs when they’re shot from a relatively safe distance. Not so with junkies. To properly shoot junkies, you have to interact with them, make yourself vulnerable. You have to crawl out of the trenches far enough to actually shoot the details—the lighters under powder-filled spoons, the bubbling liquid, the needles stuck in arms, the syringes filled with blood, the ravaged skin, the tightly wound tourniquets, the haunted stares of the walking dead.

  I’d never shot pictures of heroin addicts before. In fact, I was all set to go to Beijing to shoot what I thought would be boring student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square when Henri called me into his office. “Cancel your flight to China,” he said gruffly. Henri said everything gruffly. That’s because, true to his nickname, he was a grizzly bear stuck in the body of a man. He was an ex–war photographer, prone to spontaneous angry outbursts, and way too bulky and restless for his desk chair. I was afraid of him.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Henri was standing up behind his desk as usual. He almost never sat. “You’re going to Zurich,” he barked. “Alexi and Georges came back with shit, so now it’s your turn.” Alexi and Georges were two of the golden boys of Gamma, and if they’d come back empty-handed, I wasn’t sure why Henri thought I could do any better. But Henri had what he said was a foolproof plan—he wanted me to lie. He told me that all of the photographers who’d tried to take pictures of the Platzpitz had been roughed up by the drug dealers who’d set up shop there. A couple of cameras had been smashed. The dealers knew they had a good thing going with the free needle-exchange program in the Platzpitz. With a centralized market, low overhead, plenty of grass and park benches for their clients to collapse upon, and relatively little hassle from the Swiss police, they weren’t about to let bad publicity from some magazine photos ruin their fun.

  Henri thought if I went undercover, I could get some pictures. He told me to go only with my Leica (which, to the untrained eye, looks like a cheap toy camera) and a few dozen rolls of film in a fanny pack around my waist—no camera bag, no photographer’s vest, no press pass, no outward sign whatsoever of my pedigree as a journalist. He told me to wear shorts, a colorful T-shirt and sneakers so that I’d look as much like a silly American tourist as possible. If anyone were to ask, I was to say I was a photography student from America on vacation. I wasn’t sure the plan would work, but I warmed to the idea of going undercover in a T-shirt. For once in my life, the fact that I was five-two, female and young would not be a liability or a physical disadvantage or a curse to be hidden under an electric-blue burka.

  “You better come back with some pictures,” Henri said. “Sinon, je te casse la gueule!”—which, directly translated, means “Or else I’ll break your face.”

  Two hours later, I was on a train to Zurich. Not one of the magazines was willing to ante up any assignment money; they’d all been burned when other photographers they’d sent had come back without any pictures. Henri told me I’d just have to split the expenses of my trip with Gamma. Since I had only about 200 francs ($40) in the bank at the time, I had to take an advance of 1,000 francs ($200) from the agency, which I would then have to pay back with any future sales of my photographs. Because I had no idea if there would be any future sales or even any photographs to sell, I was determined to keep my expenses down.

  But unlike Afghanistan, where for weeks I could sleep in smelly caves for free and never have to pay a hotel bill, Switzerland was not—and never has been, at least as far as I know—a country at war. And lodging in Zurich was somewhere between expensive and outrageous. I ended up finding a cheap rooming house about half a mile away from the Platzpitz in a pretty unsavory part of town. As I was filling out the registration card at the front desk, I felt slightly queasy.

  The rooming house was filled with recent Third World immigrants, all male—Nigerians, Sri Lankans, Indians and the like. I couldn’t tell if they were awaiting processing or if they all lived there or what. I never asked. The hallways smelled like a mix of armpit sweat and onions, a scent regenerated at every mealtime when the men would crouch in small groups in the corridors to cook their rice and meat dishes on portable hot plates. They were preparing dinner when I arrived. To get to my room, I had to step over seven hot plates, fifty men mid-meal and two guys passed out sleeping. The few whose eyes I caught looked at me as if I were either an alien or dessert.

  About fifteen minutes after I’d started to unpack, one of the Nigerians knock
ed on my door to hand me an extra key to my bedroom. He told me he’d been friends with the last man who’d stayed there, and he’d forgotten to return the key to him. I thanked him and, glancing around the room with its peeling wallpaper and stained bedsheets, wondered just how many other keys to my room were currently in circulation.

  The next morning I took precautions. When I went out to shoot, heading to the Platzpitz on foot, I stuffed my fanny pack with all of my valuables—film, the advance from Gamma, my wallet and passport. As Henri suggested, I dressed like the prototypical American tourist, with the sneakers and the green tank top and the garish floral shorts. I also took a small piece of black gaffer’s tape and covered the word “Leica” on my camera, which is etched in white letters just above and to the left of the lens. That way it would be less likely to be stolen or peg me—like the press pass I’d deliberately left back in Paris—as a journalist. I’d seen other photographers do the same thing with their cameras, but I’d always thought of it as a pretentious affectation until now.

  It was a warm spring day. As I approached the Platzpitz, I noticed the lace of new leaves that had formed a canopy over the grass. It dappled the light, made everything glow. From a few blocks away, the park—filled with people, burgeoning with activity and life—looked like a Georges Seurat painting. But as I got closer, the impressionist mirage disappeared. This was no “L’Après Midi Sur L’Herbe.” It was Danté’s Inferno. Syringes and emaciated bodies littered the landscape. Boyfriends were shooting up girlfriends. This one’s teeth held tight the rubber tourniquet around the arm of that one. One raggedy guy was looking for a free vein in his ankle, having exhausted the rest of the veins on the surface of his body. A woman screamed, trying to thwart the flow of blood down her arm. Next to her, drool spilled and crusted around the mouth of a man passed out like a blissful zombie on the grass.

  In the center of the park, in a carefully constructed circle surrounding an empty gazebo, the dealers had set up brightly colored wooden folding tables that they manned as if they were selling apple pies at a county fair. But instead of baked goods, these tables were filled with everything the discerning junkie could possibly want—metal spoons, lighters, syringes, cotton balls, individually wrapped alcohol swabs, rubber tubing and, of course, little bags and foil packs of powdered heroin. The only thing missing were the needles, and these were being dispensed for free by government-paid doctors and nurses in a converted bus about twenty yards away. The line of bodies snaking around the friendly green bus was long.