The Photographer.

Guibert, Emmanuel (author) and Didier Lefèvre (author) and others.

In 1986, photographer Didier Lefèvre documented a seasoned Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) team en route to a region in the way of the insurgents’ war with the Soviet army supporting Afghanistan’s then-Marxist government. This wedding of his photos and Guibert’s European-realist comics records his arduous, frightening round trip from Normandy, where his mother lived. During the succeeding 20 years, Lefèvre lost the diary of his return trip but not his photographs. Scandalously few were published at the time, but they profit considerably by appearing in bulk and in this context; they put us near-palpably into their setting. What at first appears to be a very rough visual continuum, constantly jump-cutting from drawings to photos and back, quickly becomes suspenseful. Verbal development comes in the speech-balloons and captions of the drawings; no printing invades the photos, which become the powerful payoffs of the verbiage, at least until Lefèvre’s return trip, in which, his film and his health running out, he nearly perished. He took very few pictures then, and here Guibert rises to the challenge of maintaining the scary impetus of Lefèvre’s adventure. Perhaps no medium other than this one could convey so tangibly what it is to deliver “human services” in a war zone in one of the least geographically hospitable, most beautiful places on earth. A magnificent achievement.