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The Journey is the Destination

The Journals of Dan Eldon By Dan Eldon
Edited by Kathy Eldon

8 x 10-1/2 in; 224 pp ; Full-color images throughout, 2 gatefolds, Map
Hardcover
Published in August, 1997
ISBN 0811815862
ISBN13 9780811815864

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$35.00  

Reviews
This book has been written up almost everywhere, around the world, in local newspapers, and international publications. Here are a few of the reviews, each reflecting on the profundity of Dan Eldon's story.

By Peter Canby

Dan Eldon was only twenty-two when, at the height of conflict in Somalia, he and three other journalists were chased down by a mob enraged at a United Nations helicopter attack and stoned to death. The year was 1993. Eldon was among the first to document the famine in Somalia; he had risen rapidly through the ranks of war photographers, with spreads in Time, Newsweek, and Stern. But, as "The Journey Is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon" shows, he was an artist as well. The son of an English father and an American mother, he grew up in Nairobi, where he became fascinated by the mixture of European and African cultures and learned to speak fluent Swahili. At fifteen, he began recording his life in a series of eclectic, exuberantly collaged journals, which incorporate everything from his own drawings and paintings to stamps, matchbook covers, photographs of his friends, and self-portraits.

By the time Eldon died, he had compiled seventeen journals, the last of which -- according to his mother, Kathy, who edited the published selection -- consisted, uncharacteristically, of his Somalia photographs mounted on plain white paper. Eldon was a popular figure in Somalia, but he'd become depressed by seeing the Africa he loved crumbling around him. In one of his journals he quotes Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

Lest the Picture Fade
By Joshua Hammer

For Kathy Eldon the trip was the climax of a four-year obsession. On a blazingly hot day, last September, Eldon, her daughter, Amy, a television crew and 40 Somali bodyguards rode through the streets of Mogadishu to the rubble of a large cinder-block house. Here, on July 12, 1993, a U.N. helicopter fired missiles into a group of suspected aides to warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, killing 80 people. Minutes after the attack, Kathy's son, Dan Eldon, 22, and three other foreign jounalists were cornered by an angry mob and stoned and beaten to death. Now, as mother and daughter approached the killing site to film a documentary, another hostile crowd gathered. "They were screaming 'Get these foreigners out, we don't want to remember that horrible day'," says Kathy Eldon, 51. "We piled back into the vehicles and left in a hurry." She was both shaken and strangely elated by the experience. "There was a curious sense of joy that we'd been there and seen where he died," she says.

Kathy Eldon has not grieved quietly. Over the past four years, she has traveled across three continents--and repeatedly relived her son's horrifying end--in a quest to commemorate his brief, eventful life. She has found an eager audience. Last month Chronicle Books published "The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon," a collection of vibrant collages created by Dan from the age of 13 until his death. The book has already sold nearly 30,000 copies, and a second printing is being planned. Meanwhile, former Columbia Pictures president Lisa Henson and Oliver Stone's former partner Janet Yang are developing a feature movie about the last three years of Dan Eldon's life. Next September Amy Eldon, 23, will appear in a Turner Broadcasting documentary about Dan's career called "Dying to Tell the Story." Thousands of teenagers have participated in a Nairobi program founded in 1993 by Dan's father, Michael, called The Depot--Dan Eldon Place of Tomorrow, a sort of Outward Bound-on-the-savanna that teaches leadership skills.

Eldon's story, a mix of doomed innocence, gonzo adventure and Third World exoticism, seems tailored for cinematic mythmaking. Son of a British father and an Amencan mother, now divorced, Eldon grew up in Kenya. His charismatic energy and precocious visual talent led him, at 20, to the office of Jonathan Clayton, then Reuters' Nairobi bureau chief. "He was another affluent white African kid who announced, 'I'm a photographer,' like they all do," Clayton remembers. "But he had a wonderful eye for color and composition, and he was willing to learn." Eldon hooked up with the Reuters wire service as a freelancer, then got his big break after the December 1992 U.S. intervention in Somalia. Eldon captured vivid images of clan gunmen, starving children, Cobra helicopter gunships and bikini clad American soldiers in Mogadishu. Those pictures ran prominently in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including NEWSWEEK.

Kathy Eldon was at home in Santa Monica, Calif., when she received the news of her son's murder. "I sank to the floor and said, 'Somebody help me. Help me'," she remembers. After his violent death, Dan might well have faded into obscurity, but his family was determined not to let that happen. Michael Eldon, a Nairobi businessman, raised funds in Kenya and abroad to launch The Depot. Kathy, an aspiring film producer, began making the rounds of Hollywood film studios and publishers, often bringing along Dan's 17 bound journals. Playful pastiches of newspaper headlines, airline tickets, passport stamps, African coins, maps, condom packages, surrealistic drawings and photographs of teenage nymphets, wildlife and Masai warriors, the journals reflect both a life of white African privilege and a boundless curiosity about the world.

The Eldons' crusade hasn't won over everybody. A few of Eldon's colleagues and friends admit to feeling queasy about the relentless celebration of his short life. "The Dan Eldon I knew would have been embarrassed by it," says one Africa-based correspondent who worked closely with him. "It's over the top." Some are also bothered by the disparity between the tributes lavished on Eldon and the scant attention paid to the three journalists who died alongside him: German photographer Hansi Krauss of the Associated Press and Kenyans Hos Maina and Anthony Macharia of Reuters. Kathy Eldon finds such criticism unfair. "Dan had a spirit of adventure and awareness of the world that we're trying to communicate to people", she says. The art on display in "The Journey is the Destination" makes a promising--and poignant--beginning.

Pages Ripped from Life
By Liesl Schillinger

Just as a botanist presses flowers in a book to trap the color they held when they still lived, The Journey Is the Destination holds a life compressed in its pages. That life vibrates with vivid hues and breathing texture; it is a collage of dewy girlfriends and Masai tribesmen, of wildebeest and decrepit Land Rovers, of photos, ironic news clippings and journal entries, all of them transformed by paint, ink, hair, beads, coins and blood into a talismanic journal of an artist's youth. That artist is Dan Eldon, a dashing young Reuters photographer who was born in London, raised in Kenya, and killed in Somalia at the age of 22, when an angry crowd stoned him to death after a United Nations bombing raid. The book has been drawn from the 17 visual journals Eldon made between 1984, the year he turned 14, and 1993, the year he died; and its pages were selected by his mother, Kathy, not to mourn his death but to celebrate his exuberant, concentrated life.

At 22, an age when most of his contemporaries were frolicking in their last summer of freedom, the pause between college graduation and the yoke of the first job, Dan Eldon had been drawn by his conscience to go to Somalia, to document the famine, war and lawlessness that prevailed there in 1992 and 1993. He was hardly a hardened newsman; he was a free-spirited boy with a hungry eye for beauty. But in Somalia, he would notice a "pretty girl, wrapped in a colorful cloth," only to see later that "both her hands and feet had been severed by shrapnel. Someone had tossed a grenade in the market."

The depravity of impersonal deaths came as a shock to him. "This was my first experience with war," he wrote in a book he self-published. "Before Somalia, I had only seen two dead bodies in my life. I have now seen hundreds, tossed into ditches like sacks. The worst things I could not photograph." Only the last few pages of his journals acknowledge the stark brutality of Somalia; the others preserve a rare adolescence in which imaginative horseplay jostled with exuberant idealism.

For young people who doubt that a life grander than MTV and the mall can be achieved in this age, Eldon's journals prove otherwise. And for kids, and adults, who long for a role model in their own image, an untarnished face that represents possibility, not pompousness, Eldon stands tall. The Journals focus a spyglass on Eldon's life, showing him exploring the Great Rift Valley with his Kenyan friend Lengai Croze, photographing his sister Amy and her lissome friends in absurdist scenarios, and raising money to pay for a heart operation for a sick Kenyan girl. They chronicle his trips to Japan, Russia, America and Europe (during which he acquired a variety of lurid call-girl matchbooks), and his brief stints at a few colleges.

They also highlight the relief expedition he initiated to help Mozambiquan refugees in Malawi, an adventure for which he raised $17,000 and mobilized an international team of 12 dazzlingly attractive young people, turning the mission into an orgy of youthful philanthropy. Using two rugged cars--a Land Rover that had been nicknamed "Deziree" after a voluptuous Italian girlfriend, and another called "Arabella"--"Team Deziree" embarked on the mission of helping refugees while recording "in detail with the eyes of a child, any beauty (of the flesh or otherwise), horror, irony, traces of utopia or Hell." It was, he writes, "the Search for clean water in a swamp."

Everywhere Eldon's insights, sometimes dark, sometimes irreverent, sometimes just plain funny, scrawl across the page. "He got the agony, she got the remedy," he writes across a two-page pastiche of paint-washed savannah, guinea fowl feathers and crinkled photos of iconic youths. Excised photos of cheetah, a pig and a monk pop out along the pages' borders of shed snakeskin. Elsewhere, a collage of rice, Kenyan "Tucker" beer labels, beads, glue and journal entries overlays a newspaper page whose headline reads, "show me your breasts and I'll tell you who you are."

BUT ANOTHER multilayered page of this color-drenched book reveals a deeper purpose. Eldon stacks a folded itinerary on a blood-spattered page of a magazine called True Love, and on top of these he lays a torn sheet of cream-colored paper. On the bottom half of the paper, he has pasted an antique oval colorplate of a crabbed blue dwarf, and above that he has pasted a passage torn from Machiavelli's scheming masterwork, The Prince. Black ink bleeds out the edges of the passage, and Eldon has underlined one sentence: "A man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous." The next sentence, which remains legible on the yellowed strip, reads: "Therefore if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must learn how not to be virtuous," but Eldon did not underline it.

Just as the mission of his Team Deziree was to extract "clean water from a swamp," so Eldon seemed to try to pull the noble core out of a cynical lesson, and throw away the rot around it. Ironically, in July 1993, the grief- and rage-stricken mob that killed him did not understand how well he meant by them, as he attempted to photograph for Western eyes the bloodshed that he, like the Somalian crowd, regarded as unjust. The Journals of Dan Eldon guaranatee that the rest of us will understand, and show us that, even if we don't know who our heroes are until they die, we can still draw inspiration and direction from a life well lived, after that life has ended.

Out of African Journals, Pain Revealed--and Healed
By Hollis L. Engley
Gannett News Service

Kathy Eldon's 22-year-old son was stoned and beaten to death in Somalia in 1993.

It was only after that horrible July 13 that Eldon began to really know her son Dan, a passionate young Reuter photojournalist killed with three friends by a mob in Mogadishu.

Since his death, Kathy Eldon has pored through and helped edit the remarkably illustrated journals her son began at age 14. Next month, Chronicle Books will publish a book culled from those 17 volumes, "The Journey Is the Destination."

"I make the point to young people--be sure and stay connected to your parents. And tell them you love them," she says. "Bad things happen."

The deaths of Dan Eldon and fellow journalists Hansi Krauss of the Associated Press and Anthony Macharia and Hos Maina of Reuter were an ugly footnote to a misbegotten U.S. and United Nations intervention in Somalia's famine and civil war.

The intervention began in 1992 as a humanitarian mission by the Bush administration. (Ironically, Dan Eldon's photos of starvation in the country helped lead to the action.) But the mission bogged down in ambushes, anarchy and clan warfare. It ended in what most international observers saw as an embarrassing withdrawal in 1994. Hundreds of Somalis died, as did 102 U.N. peace-keepers. including 30 U.S. soldiers, one very publicly dragged dead through the Mogadishu streets. After the troops' departure, the country was as unstable as ever.

Dan Eldon's death was quickly lost amid the gunfire and international recriminations. Except to his family and friends.

Soon, many more will know him through Chronicle Books' "The Journey Is the Destination" (27.50), a labyrinthine condensation of Eldon's deeply personal journals. A feature film about his life, written by "Shine" scriptwriter Jan Sardi, is planned for release in 1998, as is a Turner Network Television documentary on journalists killed in combat.

Eldon was born in London in 1970 to his American mother, Kathy, and British father, Mike. When he was 7, the family, including younger sister Amy, moved to Kenya. In Nairobi he studied at the international school with children from 46 nations. It made him, his mother says, "extraordinarily resilient, positive, flexible" and comfortable with people of many cultures.

Though he returned to summer camp every year in Wisconsin, worked at 17 as a magazine intern in New York and went to college in California, he never forgot Africa.

While at Pasadena Community College in 1990, he organized Student Transport Aid. With 13 fellow students, he raised $17,000, went to Africa, bought a Toyota Land Cruiser and drove to a refugee camp in Malawi. There, they donated the car to Save the Children and used the remaining money to pay for wells, tools and blankets.

"We were a ragtag group of ambitious young people," says Elinor Tatum, now 26 and associate publisher and chief operating officer of The Amsterdam News in New York City. In I990, she was just out of her freshman year at college when she called Eldon and said she wanted to go along.

"There was a light of some sort, that emanated from Dan and still does, that keeps those that knew him going and brings about some kind of hope . . . to carry on what he started.''

Tatum remembers one of her friend's Somalian photographs. "He's got a picture of a flooded shop in Mogadishu with little girls playing in the water," she says. "What he captured there was the life and the spirit of the people in the middle of horror. He found the life and the love and the hope of people. And that's what was so incredibly special about him."

Spurning college after the Malawi safari Eldon opened a photography business in Nairobi. In the summer of 1992 he heard of the famine in Baidoa, Somalia. Traveling there with a friend, his photos of starvation caught the world's attention.

He revisited Somalia repeatedly until his death, taking pictures of the copters overhead, the chaos on the ground--and building his journals all the while.

Now, the journal and the memories are what Kathy Eldon has left. She has lived with the books since his death--clippings, drawings, photos and mementoes, and the words scrawled across the pages.

Through them, she knows her son much more deeply now than she did when he died. "Absolutely. And I'm really appalled." she says from Los Angeles. Appalled, she means, at her ignorance. "Like most parents. I was really really busy in those years. I was a journalist. I was working and traveling. I left my husband and I left Africa and moved to London. So many of us are so busy we don't take the time to connect with our own children."

Kathy and Dan Eldon weren't estranged. They loved each other. They talked by phone just before his death. She told him she was proud of him. He offered her a ticket to Africa. She made the same offer in the opposite direction. But she was busy with her work in London. And he was busy in Africa, his home. He cared for the people there so much that he repeatedly walked into dangerous situations to get the pictures that he was sure would make the world understand the Somalis' pain.

Instead, he died with his friends in a hail of blows and stones thrown by Somalis furious at an attack by U.N. forces that killed 56 people and wounded more than 200. "If he could have turned around and talked to them he would be alive today," Elinor Tatum says. "Because he had a silver tongue. He could talk his way out of anything."

"It was not a racist attack," Kathy Eldon says now, without bitterness. "It was a rage attack. And, you know, I understand the rage. I always wondered what I would do in that situation. I know I wouldn't have picked up a stone, but I know I would have been enraged."

Her pain at his death, she says, was "inexpressibly horrible." She went to Kenya with her daughter for her son's memorial service on land of the Masai people at the edge of the Rift Valley.

"The true reality of the loss only emerges after the ashes have been strewn," she says. "I returned to Los Angeles where I knew no one."

There, she began to read Dan's journals and the idea for "The Journey Is the Destination" was born.

Author Info
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 in 1993.

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.

Quotes
The power of Dan Eldon's art is a dazzling testament to the way in which he lived his life. . . Jan Sardi, screenwriter, Shine

Wild with sex and death, the collection resembles the illuminations of a young Blake. British Esquire