The Sunday Times November 14, 2021 19Travel Interview
Left, McCurry’s famous 1984
photograph The Afghan Girl.
Above, his photo of a boy in a
makeshift bicycle seat, Angkor
Wat, Cambodia, in 2000E
ven if you don’t
know who Steve
McCurry is,
you’ve seen his
photography.
Over four decades McCurry
posters have hung in
university halls and youth
hostels worldwide. His
pictures have adorned the
covers of National Geographic
magazine, packed out
exhibitions and auctions, and
amassed him three million
followers on Instagram. So
you have seen his photos and,
in a way, his photos have seen
you. McCurry’s subjects often
stare right at the viewer, eyes
trained directly down the
lens. Sometimes there is a
whiff of a challenge, of
confrontation — or a vague
sense that they are awaiting
an answer to a question you
might have missed.
“Sometimes you see a
picture and it makes you
wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
McCurry says. “That’s the
beauty of the whole thing. In
photography a lot of the time
your imagination tells a better
story than the actual
circumstances.”
My imagination tells me
that Steve McCurry is a
swashbuckling adventurer full
of anecdotes of derring-do —
the actual version is humble,
low-key, speaking in halting
sentences, as if he had just
spied something new to
photograph out of the corner
of his eye. During the
pandemic he was grounded
at home in the US — in Arizona
and his native Philadelphia —
but it did afford him time to
reflect on his immense back
catalogue.
“Looking through your
archive, it can be wonderful
to come across something you
may have missed,” he says.
“Then there is the other thing
where you think, ‘There are a
lot of bad pictures here, and
why did I spend so much time
on that?’ After 40 years of
almost never being home, it
was kind of a relief to suddenly
not be able to travel.”
The result of this sedentary
interlude is a new book,
Stories & Dreams: Portraits
of Childhood. The collection
features the diverse people
and places that are his
trademark — bright costumes,
shimmering seas, burnt-out
battle tanks, religious
processions. And there are
also the universal human
qualities McCurry has said
it is his mission to reveal: the
vulnerabilities, aspirations
and mischief of childhood.
Many are old pictures, but
the old master is seeing them
through new, more tender
eyes. Aged 71, he now has a
four-year-old daughter — he
says he doesn’t take her with
him on work trips because
she tends to chase pigeons.
And he also admits that there
are pictures in this collection
that, in 2021, he might no
longer take.
“There was a time when
— in Europe or the States — you
could photograph kids without
STEVE MCCURRY/MAGNUM PHOTOSGlobe-trotting photographer Steve McCurry
talks to Oliver Smith about a lifetime of portraits,
and that haunting image of a young Afghan girl
THE
EYES
HAVE IT
people thinking there’s some
ulterior motive,” McCurry
says. “Now you even avoid
trying because of that. That’s
a result of people being
suspicious of the camera.
I think that it’s a pity.”
McCurry first dreamt of
being a photographer when
he was a child, flicking through
Life magazine aged 12 and
happening across pictures of
the monsoon in India. Working
as a newspaper photographer
in Pennsylvania didn’t cure his
curiosity: in his twenties he
moved to India to hone his
craft. It is still in places far
from home that he finds the
most creative gratification.
“You’re always more
fascinated with other places,”
he says. “That’s why people go
on vacation: they want to go
see and experience different
foods, different music, aAfghan Girl is a 1984 photo of
Sharbat Gula, aged roughly
12, taken near Peshawar in
Pakistan. Dubbed a modern
Mona Lisa, it is the definitive
McCurry portrait, with an
almost supernatural stare
that seems to penetrate the
viewer’s soul.
“I know Afghans have
always been proud of her, and
the picture,” he says. “There
was this dignity, a sense of
fortitude and resilience. Even
though she is clearly a girl
living in a refugee camp, she
still had her head held high
and she was unflinching. I
think that resonates now with
the situation in Afghanistan.”
This picture, McCurry has
said, changed his life and it
will be the image that he is
most remembered for. In 2002
he returned to Afghanistan
with a National Geographic
crew to track down the grown-
up Gula: since then, the media
have used her situation as a
bellwether for the state
of the country. It was
a seismic moment
in modern
photography,
and it also
might never
have
happened.
McCurry was
walking home to
his hotel for lunch
when he heard voices
coming from a makeshift
classroom at a refugee camp.
“There were so many
variables — if the light had
been different, if her
expression had been different,
if the background had been
different, if it had been shot
in black and white,” he says.
“But sometimes fortune can
smile on you.”
McCurry’s hunger for travel
has been undimmed ever
since he left home for India as
a young man. He’s just back
from Sicily and Naples and is
hoping to travel to Myanmar
or Thailand in the near future.
He is unpretentious in his
philosophy and has been
reluctant to talk about the
technical aspects of his
photography. The method
he will share is ceaselessly
stomping dusty roads across
continents; in being present,
being observant — being ready
when something magical
strays in front of his lens.
“You’re always running
scared,” McCurry says. “You
always think, ‘Should I be
doing better than I have done?
Have I been as productive as I
could?’ You think, ‘Let me try
one more time, let me try, let
me try!’ If you’re out there
working constantly, now and
then you’re due something
extraordinary.”Steve
McCurry’s
latest book
Stories &
Dreams:
Portraits of
Childhood
(Laurence
King) is
out nowdifferent language. That’s
what I wanted to do, but
maybe on a grander scale.
I want to go somewhere new
and learn something.”
McCurry’s career flowered
in the late 1970s and 1980s,
the twilight years of the hippy
trail, when Lonely Planet
guidebooks boomed and
backpackers abounded. To
a generation for whom
serious photography had once
meant stark black-and-white
compositions, McCurry’s
colour pictures were
luminous, arresting and
sometimes aspirational. Some
of his work might be read as an
invitation to hit the open road.
Other photos showed the
worst of humankind: AK47s,
charred bodies, burning oil
wells. McCurry himself has
twice been reported dead.
A lingering tension in
McCurry’s career is what kind
of photographer he is — war
photographer, journalist or
artist? The purity of
his work was
questioned by
some in 2016
when it
emerged that
an image of
Cuba had been
manipulated
(he said the
error in one image
was “a mistake”
and said he preferred to
consider his work “visual
storytelling”). The same
year a New York Times
Magazine article criticised
McCurry’s India collection
for presenting “old ideas of
what photographs of Indians
should look like”. I ask him
if he has become more
conscious of his western
perspective when, in the
age of camera phones, local
people are increasingly
capable of telling their own
visual stories.
“I don’t buy into the idea
that I shouldn’t go to Angkor
Wat [in Cambodia] and
spend a few months there
photographing — or go to
Rajasthan or Tibet. [People
are] able to come to the
UK or the US, or wherever,
and wander around with
their camera and make their
own impressions. There
are excellent Indian, Chinese
and African photographers.”
Perhaps more than
anywhere else, McCurry’s
career is most closely tied
to Afghanistan, which he
photographed during the
Soviet invasion of the 1980s,
traipsing through snow and
sleeping rough under cold
mountain skies. A remote,
misunderstood corner of the
Cold War suddenly became
intimate and urgent through
his images. Until recently
McCurry ran a programme
that taught Afghan girls
photography. The 2021
resurgence of the Taliban has
put a stop to it, a situation he
describes as “heartbreaking”.
Recent events in
Afghanistan have put
McCurry’s most famous
exposure back into focus. TheYou always
think, ‘Should I
be doing better
than I have
done?’
Shaolin monks in training, photographed in 2004 in Zhengzhou, China