Once in a while a book comes along that shakes up your perception of how much books still have to develop despite the rapid rise of digital media.

This story of French doctors in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion in the 1980s is outside the field of Raj photography. Yet it points to a direction which could make Raj photography so much more accessible: the comic book.

The comic book plus the photograph. Leave it to the French to figure it out perfectly with this bestseller. Originally published in French in 3 volumes between 2003 and 2006, it was just released in an English translation.

The Photographer tells the story of a young French professional photographer, Didier Lefevre, who went on a photographic expedition into Afghanistan in 1986 with the charity Doctors without Borders. The country was still occupied by the Russians. Doctors without Borders was providing medical help to remote, often Mujahideen-controlled pockets in the north of the country where medical assistance was scarce and desperately needed.

The book weaves together Lefevre's photographs with the animated story of his harrowing journey into Badakhshan province. The narrative is gripping and powerful, as are the comic illustrations by Emmanuel Guibert. There is no underestimating the design that went into this book with its careful mixture of animated and real. A separate designer, Frederic Lemercier, was also a major contributor, and the English translation is by an experienced graphic novelist. There is no underestimating the many parts that must come together to make something like this work so well.

The mixture of photography and animation is so successful and striking. Put back into the context of an illustrated color story, the photographs - of warlords, children undergoing operations in kerosene-lit tents, breathtaking valleys, life-and-death treks - acquire greater power and significance. Much of Raj photo research involves giving context back to old photographs. This is almost always done with words. This book suggests another avenue, one with far wider reach if done well.

Imagine Samuel Bourne's Photographic Journeys in the Himalayas as a comic book story with his incredible images from the 1860s? Or John Burke's war photography trips into Afghanistan in the 1870s as an animated tale? Lala Deen Dayal's famine works photography in the Deccan plateau of the 1890s within a visual narrative?

The Photographer is an heir, in fact, to Raj photography of the Frontier and Afghanistan. Where earlier photographers were embedded with military campaigns, Lefevre went with a medical expedition. He soon found himself very much alone, at the mercy of Afghans and Pakistanis he had no connection to. Still, he could not stop clicking his camera and bring back those precious rolls of film. Even as he thought he was going to die, he pressed the button.

Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood - she did the Farsi lettering for this volume - or Art Spiegelmanm's Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History , The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders is a one-of-a-kind book that will hopefully inspire other writers, photographers and creators to scale new heights in the telling of stories with images.