Steve McCurry’s name may not trigger immediate recognition, but his most famous picture certainly will: Afghan Girl, taken in a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1984, a 12-year-old called Sharbat Gula whose startlingly bright eyes took the shot all the way to the cover of National Geographic magazine. McCurry’s career is considerably more than this one picture, but such is its fame it provides significant ballast to his reputation and elevates him into photography’s elite.
So what does this admiring profile tell us? McCurry is a pretty truculent customer, unwilling to give much away; but uncompromisingly direct when he wants to be. There’s a little archeology into his troubled childhood, including an unlucky hand injury and a spell at Christian boarding school. His career gets into gear when he follows the mid-70s hippy trail to India and ends up crossing the border into Afghanistan to cover the country’s civil war that followed the communist coup in 1978. (McCurry is pretty vague on the politics of the fighters he accompanied.) The Soviet invasion in 1979 proved to be his big break, driving a major media appetite for pictures that only a few months previously he, as an unknown photographer in a barely noticed conflict, couldn’t sell.
