Steve McCurry
“What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling.”
~Steve McCurry
There’s something compelling about the human condition.
Something fascinating about stories which revolve around the various triumphs, tragedies and experiences of our own kind.
It is these stories of loss, love and life that form the basis of our humanity, and with that said, it is no wonder I, like so many others, am drawn to the work of photographer Steve McCurry.
McCurry’s work has appeared in numerous publications over the course of his 30+ year career, though he is probably most notable for his prints which have appeared in National Geographic. The photograph above, “Afghan Girl,” was one of the magazine’s most iconic covers in June 1985, and the image was taken in a refugee camp during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). The profiling of Gula is characteristic of McCurry’s prints, as most of his pictures highlight the human condition. As written in his National Geographic biography,
“McCurry captures the essence of human struggle and joy.”
What drew me to McCurry’s photographs was the intensity of the color in his prints, the piercing gazes of many of his subjects, and the locale of his pictures. McCurry has taken great risks during his career; he has traversed the globe and entered a number of war-torn, conflict-filled countries. Again, in the words of National Geographic,
“He focuses on the human consequences of war, not only showing what war impresses on the landscape, but rather, on the human face.”
Here are a few images that highlight the immense beauty of his work.
These two photos exemplify the raw emotion that McCurry oftentimes manages to capture on film. As I sifted through the images on his official website, I appreciated how the images’ lack of context added to their mystery and appeal. Oddly enough, it is the absence of background information that enhances the pictures’ abilities to strike an emotional chord. A lack of definition manages to make the pictures that much clearer.
Portraits aren’t all that McCurry specializes in. The versatility of his work is evident in these two images taken during the Gulf War Oil Spill that is known in part for being one of the largest oil spills in history.
The picture on the left immediately caught my eye because of the juxtaposition between man and nature. Innocent camels are caught in the midst of an environmental disaster as clouds of flame and black smoke billow in the sky. The deep space also helps to exemplify the magnitude of the issue at hand.
In contrast, the image to the right makes use of shallow space in order to focus on the dire predicament of an individual who presumably died. I was and continue to be haunted by the photograph, but I also commend McCurry’s willingness to document EVERYTHING — the good, the bad and the ugly — while performing his duties as a photojournalist.
McCurry’s work involves far more than war and sadness. Whether he’s snapping a picture of an Afghan coal miner or a young Buddhist monk in Myanmar, he continues to masterfully freeze tidbits of the human spirit in time.
And that is priceless.
“Portraits reveal a desire for human connection; a desire so strong that people who know they will never see me again open themselves to the camera, all in the hope that at the other end someone will be watching,
someone who will laugh or suffer with them.A true portrait should today and a hundred years from today, be the testimony of how this person
looked and what kind of human being he or she was.”~ Philippe Halsman, 1906–1979
