Sharbat Gula, the Afghan Girl
THE MONA LISA OF PHOTOJOURNALISM
From a sea of children in an
Afghan refugee camp, photographer
Steve McCurry singled out a girl in a
red shawl. She was shy, but willing
to have her photo taken; at first she
put her hands up to cover her face,
then her teacher asked her to show
her face so the world could know her
and her story. After a few snapshots,
she ran off to play with her friends,
and that was it. Little did McCurry
know that his portrait, which came to
be known simply as “the Afghan girl”
with her piercing green eyes would
later become one of the most iconic
photographs in history.
Dubbed the Mona Lisa of
photojournalism, the Afghan Girl’s
image was taken in December 1984,
at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp on
the Afghan-Pakistan border, where for
decades, Afghans had begun moving
to Pakistan following the Soviet
invasion of their country in 1979.
The girl’s haunting stare reflects
a steely defiance in spite of fear, and
it is an arresting image that remains
in your mind long after you’ve flipped
past the page, compelling one to make
a personal response.
“People volunteered to work in
the refugee camps because of that
photograph,” shared McCurry. Apart
from inspiring philanthropy, the
Afghan Girl image quickly became
a symbol of her people’s strength
against the odds.
Who exactly is she? The answer
to this question remained elusive for
17 years, until a National Geographic
team brought McCurry back to
Pakistan in 2002 to locate her. There
were many red herrings along the way,
as many women identified themselves
as the Afghan Girl and husbands
claimed their wives to be her.
Finally, McCurry identified a woman
from the mountains near Tora Bora
in eastern Afghanistan as the little
lady from the refugee camp. Her face
had been weathered by time and toil,
but the intensity of the Afghan Girl’sBy Kathy PohA Steve McCurry photo
exhibition in Budapest,
Hungary in February 2016
depicting the Afghan Girlglance was strong as ever; and her
name is Sharbat Gula.
Sharbat’s life has seen her endure
more hardships than most of us would
likely ever face in a lifetime. As a child,
she experienced the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan, where bombings
razed her village and rendered her
an orphan. Led by her grandmother,
Sharbat and her siblings then made
a week-long trek across wintry
mountains on foot to reach a refugee
camp to live in a cramped space with
strangers – where her enigmatic
portrait was taken. The years that
passed since then never provided
much relief; Sharbat moved back to
Afghanistan with her husband and
three daughters in the mid-1990s,
subsisting on terraces of grain crops
and a stream that ceased to flow in
times of drought.
After her encounter with the National
Geographic team, Sharbat soon
retreated back into a life of obscurity.
“I don’t think she was particularly
interested in her personal fame,”
McCurry said. “But she was pleased
when we said she had come to be a
symbol of the dignity and resilience of
her people.”
The story of Sharbat gives us a
peek into the lives of six million other
Afghan refugees, a result of almost
four decades’ worth of conflict. The
lucky ones are granted asylum or
permanent visas whereupon they can
begin new lives, while others – like
Sharbat, whose Pakistani documents
were discovered by the authorities in
2015 to be forged – are perpetually on
the run. agPHOTO © ATTILA VOLGYI/XINHUA PRESS/CORBISiCon