Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25044
• Edited by Kathy Eldon::(Chronicie BooksL summer of 1992. A tri-culture kid (English/American growing up in London and Nairobi), the 21 year old already had a lifetime of globe-trotting under his belt Da n E I don' S life took a violent turn in the when he pointed his nose towards the newest stir in East Africa. But the curiosity Dan chased into famine stricken and war-torn Somalia led him to a sober reali ty beyond his youthful imagination. On the wide-eyed end of a career as a Reuters photographer, Eldon was stoned to death while shooting the aftermath of an American bombing of Mogadishu by an inscensed Somalian mob. The Journey Is the Destination (Chronicle) is an anti-coffee table book full of delight and sadness, a visual coming-of-age account. Its pages are culled from 17 private journals spanning the last eight years of Dan's life-from a revelatory class field trip at age 14 to the days just before his death in July, 1993. We escape easily into the swirly and ebullient pages of African fabric, beads, paint, and intimate photos mashed and finessed by an inspired and excep tionally creative youth. Yet we cannot escape the fact that we have been given the oportunity to spy into so private a collection only because of Qan's tragic headline death. Eldon's pages are powerful ·Iy thin on words, lending immortality to the occasional phrase he tucks in between impassioned photos, sketches and excerpts from letters and books. Memories of "spitting on cliffs " and maxims like "safari as a way of life" need no elaboration. The I'ast pages of Journey are as dif ferent from its core as can be. The frenzied collage form gives way to formally positioned, well-composed photographs of war-documents of a time suddenly less about romance and go-man-go. Unfortunately, Journey is a graphic Bildungsroman cut short. It serves as a footnote to a brief brilliant career. r+ :::T' CD U) CD CD >< CD .., -0 CD ;j n CD U) n :::T' Q) ;j Ul CD a.. ......... 3 CD 0- c r+ -. ...... CD CD a. ...... ...... CD .., CD ::J t+