DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN

This photo, taken backstage at a strip joint called the Pussycat Lounge in Boston, was one of the first I ever shot. I've never been that lucky since.

This photo was a part of my college senior thesis, "Shooting Back." I'd been mugged several times, and I was afraid to go out, so the idea was to go into areas specifically dangerous to women, and if someone approached me or made a comment or asked for sexual favors, I'd turn around and say, "No thank you, but I would like to shoot your photo." And thus prey became hunter. Or at least that was the idea.

This was during the first intifadah back in the late '80's. I liked the way this girl was holding a cookie in one hand and a bullet in the other. I have no idea if she is Israeli or Palestinian.

This was taken on my third trip to Israel, when I spent one week living with a Jewish family in a settlement, one week living with a Palestinian family in Ramallah. This photo was shot in the settlement. It's a Palestinian construction worker peeking out of the van that transported him to work.

Kachagari refugee camp, near the border of Afghanistan, toward the end of the war with the Soviet Union

This was the border crossing from Pakistan into Afghanistan. This, I believe, was the self-appointed border-guard. I liked the way it looks as if he's just hanging out in his living room.

The end of the war between Afghanistan and the USSR, the beginning of the chaos to come.

This was the clinic where I was taken to deal with a schrapnel wound in my hand. Let's just say there weren't a lot of anesthetics involved.

The Platzpitz Park during an experimental needle exchange program, to curb the spread of AIDS.

A heroin user in his illegal squat

Girl gang initiation ceremony in the Watts section of Los Angeles. The new member has to endure 40 seconds of unrelenting beating by other members, without hitting back.

This young man was a friend of the girl gangs. He stood guard at his bedroom window, worried that his rival gang was on their way to kill him.

The Zimbabwean government had issued a shoot to kill edict for rhino poachers. Any poacher caught red-handed with a rhino horn was to be shot immediately, without trial or warning. This young man was most likely a Zambian who'd crossed the Zambezi River to try to earn enough food for his family to eat. He was shot in the back, multiple times, as he cooked his morning breakfast.

This image was taken on assignment for the newspaper Libération right after the fall of Ceaucescu.

I had a Romanian friend named Doru whom I met while covering the end of Ceaucescu's dictatorship in Bucharest, and he told me about hospitals he'd heard about where "unrecoverable" children were left to languish in Dantesque conditions. This was the hospital we found, exactly the way we found it: no mattresses, the children dressed in rags and filth, all of them malnourished and running wild. I sent the film to my agency and was scolded for not covering the elections, as I'd been told to do. The film was not sent out for distribution to the magazines, and the following photographs, with rare exception, were never published.

This little boy in the background had been tied by the ankle to the bed when we arrived. We demanded that he be untied. When he was released, he simply stayed in his former tied-up position.

After my agency said they wouldn't distribute my photos in black and white, because magazines preferred color, I went back to Vulturesti to shoot the story using color film. Some of these made it into magazines. Most of them didn't. You have to put this conundrum into context: film had to be physically transported, via a willing passenger at an airport, back to the photographer's home base. Then it had to be developed. Then edited, using whatever captions the photographer was able to scribble on an envelope. Then it had to be physically distributed, via men driving on motorcycles ("motards") around Paris, to the various magazines. A far cry from today's digital world.

By the second day of the coup, most of the army had switched loyalties from communist hardliners (Yanayev, etc.) to Yeltsin. Hence, the flowers on their gun barrels, which were distributed mostly by babushkas who shamed the soldiers into breaking command.

This was the last night of the Soviet coup. A group of tanks, whose loyalties lay with the pro-communist putsch leaders, approached the barricade set up on the ring road near the White House, where Yeltsin was holed up. They tried to bash their way through the trolley cars, which were parked perpendicular to the road. Chaos ensued. (See below.)

My flash had nearly run out of battery power, and I only had 100 ASA Fujichrome film with me, so this is the kind of image I was able to shoot as violence broke out on the last night of the Soviet coup. Despite its blurriness, I kind of like it anyway. It's certainly closer to the way I remember that night than a crisp, well-focused, well-lit photo would have been. Or so I tell myself. In case you can't make out what the blob on the right is, it's a moving tank, and on the left of the frame is a man standing in its path.

This is the image Newsweek chose to use as a double-page spread in the magazine to illustrate the last night of the "bloodless" coup. It is reminiscent, if you will, of a football touchdown photo, and it was taken seconds before the photo below, which is the one I choose to remember instead. As for the working flash, it was one of those weird things: it just started working again, for a brief moment, before it died completely.

What is there to say about this photo? There was violence. Molotov cocktails tossed into tanks. Bullets sprayed into the unarmed crowd. This man was shot a few feet away from me, while I cowered on the ground with my head in a puddle. I sometimes still see him in my dreams.

This photo was taken the day after the previous photos, when three men died on the last night of the Soviet coup. The Soviet Union was no more. But what would the new Russia look like? I wandered over to Red Square and saw this Soviet soldier, with his hammer and sickle hat, walking down the empty square over rain-slicked cobblestones.

This image was taken about an hour after the earlier image, when the clouds began to clear as the sun set over Red Square. And no, no special filters were involved. That's what the sky looked like at that moment: magical.

This is my eldest son playing Legos with some Afghani kids in the Kachagari refugee camp (yes the same camp from the photo of the Afghan women taken above, only 12 1/2 years later) near the border of Afghanistan two months after 9/11. His first grade class had been collecting money for Afghani refugees, a project which some of the parents in the class turned against. ("Isn't that like raising money for the enemy?") I told the teacher I supported her project and would try to figure out a way to get the money--along with some toys, food and school supplies--directly to the refugees ourselves. Amy Gross and Susan Chumsky at O Magazine funded/assigned our trip, many of the parents in the class who also supported the project helped us gather the school supplies, and off we went.