Can there ever be enough news round-up posts on The Photographer? To our delight, the answer (as yet) seems to be no: more people are talking about this book every day.
"This isn't just a great photography book, it's a great novel, a great comic, a great memoir, and a great history text." — boingboing
"The Photographer will make you weep, laugh, and empty your pockets
to donate to the extraordinarily courageous Doctors Without Borders,
which won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize." — The New Haven Advocate
"To follow these doctors, as Lefevre follows them, is to wonder about
these things. The doctors — and the young girls they find broken in
the fallen light — are the indelible characters in The Photographer.
To ponder what sends them out and what keeps them going, as Guibert
does, is to ask how we might find the place that both exhausts us and
our sense of what we have left to do." — The Oregonian
"Lefèvre spent four gruelling months with the
Doctors without Borders team in Afghanistan. It took a toll. He
returned to France in bad shape. He was exhausted and malnourished. He
lost 14 teeth. But he carried with him some 4,000 photographs. Lefèvre
considered himself lucky to get six of them published in a two-page
spread in the French daily Liberation. He boxed up the rest of the
photos, and went on to other photo jobs. Until 1999: that's when a
childhood friend of Lefèvre's prodded him a bit. That friend just
happened to be graphic novelist and comics artist Emmanuel Guibert." — PRI
"'Photographs and drawings are like oil and water. They're always
fighting,' says Mr. Guibert. 'In the drawings, I've put only what I
thought was necessary to fill in the blanks where Didier did not take
photos.'" — The Wall Street Journal
I found some uninterrupted time and read the entire book Sunday. Quite impressive. My only two criticisms:
Having seen the gallery show with the large silver prints, the images in the book are too small!
A book this impressive and this big should have a hardcover edition!
Perhaps after the dust has settled on all the multiple awards this book has/will earned, you could publish a deluxe 10-year anniversary edition with the pictures on DVD. (Or, outdo Spiegelman and place the entire book on DVD, with the ability to hyperlink the original photos and artwork, recorded interviews, detailed topographic maps, documentary footage of MSF…)
I like the writing structure of your blog and it does a pretty decent job of presenting the material.