Steve McCurry

In the feedback for my last assignment, Sharon recommended that I spend more time looking at photographers I’m interested as this would help to open up greater creative responses within my own practice. I feel I haven’t spent enough time doing this as there’s so much involved with this course that it’s difficult to  get everything done. However, I completely recognize the need for it, and so have promised myself to spend more time looking at photographers I like.

One of these photographers is Steve McCurry (born Feb. 24th 1950), the American photojournalist whose most famous work ‘Afghan Girl’ was praised by National Geographic thus:

“….. many have described as the most recognizable photograph in the world today”.

(http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photographers/photographer-steve-mccurry/)

(You can see McCurry’s full profile on the National Geographic website here .)

In trying to figure out why I admire the work of Steve McCurry so much, I realized that it wasn’t just his work I like; I’m also fascinated by his life story, and I guess, by the man himself.

McCurry was working freelance in India, and it was there that he developed the skills that have helped him capture the evocative images that he has done.

“ If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view”.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McCurry)

While in India, McCurry disguised himself in native clothes and crept across the border into Afghanistan equipped with little more than his camera and film, just before the start of the Soviet invasion. He came back with rolls of film sewn into his clothes, and these images won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad.

This was just the beginning, and following on from this McCurry has covered various armed conflicts around the world throughout his career which have enabled him to become a regular contributor to National Geographic and a member of Magnum since 1986.

So, his life interests me as much as his images. Throughout his career, McCurry has suffered his own scares and dangers; a plane crash, muggings and bombings, but it seems that this has only made him more determined to continue with his work. (Please see a recent TIME interview with him about his recent work here.

Wikipedia has this to say about him:

“McCurry focuses on the human consequences of war, not only showing what war impresses on the landscape, but rather, on the human face. “Most of my images are grounded in people. I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face. I try to convey what it is like to be that person, a person caught in a broader landscape, that you could call the human condition.”

I think that it’s the above that draws me into his images most of all. I’m fascinated by what we can see on the face of a person, especially in the eyes. Do the eyes and face alone give you a hint as to what hardships the subject has endured? Can this be shown in a photograph where some of the time there is no background present to add context? As McCurry says, maybe “the soul does drift up into view”.

It reminds me of the Shinoyama Kishin exhibition I visited last year in which images of survivors of the 2011 Tsunami were on display. Shinoyama’s images had the context of houses etc destroyed in the tsunami in the background, but they still relied a lot on what could be gathered from the faces of the subjects. In most cases, depair and helplessness, but also defiance (especially on the faces of the more elderly subjects).

Another thing which strikes me about the images are the use of colour, which is something that I came to understand as being an integral part of images whilst studying the previous course, The Art of Photography. McCurry’s use of colour is certainly evocative, and it reminded me somewhat of Mitchell Kanashkevic’s use of colour in his images. (That should probably be the other way around though, considering McCurry was probably using colour in this way before Mitchell was even born).

McCurry has stated that he was inspired  by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange; two other photographers who are on my list to look into having reread Charlotte Cotton’s ‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art’.

You can see of more Steve McCurry’s work on his website http://stevemccurry.com/

He also has a blog which shows some of his recent work and thoughts: http://stevemccurry.wordpress.com/ .

Tags: Steve McCurry