The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon - Hardcover

Dan Eldon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811815862 ISBN 13: 9780811815864

Publisher: Chronicle Books, 1997

Synopsis

By the time he was twenty-two, Dan Eldon had led a relief mission across Africa; worked as a graphic designer in New York; studied (intermittently) at four colleges; traveled through Europe, Africa, Japan, and the US; founded a charity for Mozambiquan refugees; directed a film; written a book; started up his own photography business; and become a photojournalist for Reuters news agency, covering the famine and civil war in Somalia. There, in 1993, he was killed in an eruption of mob violence while on assignment. In a world of rules and regularity, Eldon was a renegade, a risk-taker, and an adventurer. But, despite all his travels, he knew that the interior landscape is the only one truly worth exploring, and this is the journey he dedicated himself to recording. His is no ordinary journal; it is an astonishing seventeen-volume collage of photos, drawings, words, maps, clippings, paint, scraps, shards, and trash that reveals his strange and vivid life. The Journey is the Destination offers a selection of pages from these extraordinary journals, at once the vision of an artist in his prime and the unrestrained outpourings of a young man just beginning to live.

About this title

Review:

Dan Eldon, who was only 22 when he was chased down and killed by an angry mob in Somalia, was one of the youngest photographic stringers in Africa. But his journalistic work, which had appeared in Time and Newsweek, showed only a small part of his talent. Eldon excelled as an artist in his collages, which combined his photographs of Africa with paint, pastiche, pop culture images, advertising, and official documents. The Journey Is the Destination collects pages from the 17 scrapbooks that held his art. Chronicling his work from age 14 through his death at 22, this volume is startling not only in the intensity and thoughtfulness of the pages, but also in the fact that someone so young could have this kind of artistic depth and insight.

About the Author:

Dan Eldon was born in London in 1970 and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. His photographs of Somalia's brutal famine, published in newspapers worldwide, helped trigger the world's conscience. Eldon was stoned to death by a Somali mob reacting against a UN bombing

Kathy Eldon is co-producing both a feature film about her son's life and a documentary about journalists who put their lives at risk to tell a story. She lives in Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0811815862
• ISBN 13: 9780811815864
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Kathy Eldon