Feast for the Eyes, food for thought
Xposure hosts a retrospective, appropriately titled Iconic, of the famous photos of Steve McCurry. The man behind the camera shares his processes for making iconic images.
Catherine Mazy
Two things are particularly striking about Steve McCurry’s photos: the rich colours and the dignity of the subjects.
McCurry, and a fifty-year career that has made him one of the world’s most admired photographers, was celebrated at Sharjah’s Xposure International Photography Festival in February with a retrospective titled Iconic. Most often applied to the image he is best known for—his 1984 portrait Afghan Girl—iconic is true of many of his other famous images, too.
“It’s just whatever I thought was inspiring or memorable, the things I felt were important,” he says, in a soft, measured voice. The interview is via video call to Pennsylvania, where he grew up and still calls home. The setting is unpretentious and unphotogenic: around him, metal shelves are lined with archives; the lighting is fluorescent. He wears a sport jacket and a baseball cap covers the grey stubble of his hair. His eyes are framed by the wrinkles that come from smiling. He looks much younger than his 71 years.
During the interview, McCurry mostly looks down or into the distance. He has spoken to huge audiences and appeared in front of the camera in documentaries for National Geographic, the magazine that made him famous, as well as a documentary about himself. He has approached strangers around the world to ask to take their photos. Yet he seems bashful in front of his computer’s camera. “I’m basically shy,” he admits.
Zhengzhou, China (2004), top. Rich colours, careful composition and celebration of culture are hallmarks of McCurry’s work. Pol-e-Khomri, Afghanistan (2002), above. McCurry’s portrait subjects look directly into the lens, heightening their dignity.
For someone who backpacked across the Indian subcontinent, including into Afghanistan for some of the first photos of the Russian invasion in 1979, McCurry might seem like a thrill seeker. He isn’t. Instead, he has been driven by curiosity and a desire to capture the beauty in the world.
“I never consciously photographed this or that,” he says. “It’s just what expresses my creativity and my art and makes a comment on my feeling about life or being on this planet or things that were important to me in life’s journey.”
McCurry has photographed around the world, several times over, and many of his striking images were taken in what many people would consider to be exotic locations. India, where he made his first trip abroad in the late 1970s and one of his favourite places to return to, “has changed so much,” he says. “It’s still interesting.” Similarly, places like Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Tibet, and Myanmar are modernising while still holding onto ancient cultures. McCurry is drawn to the aspects that are in danger of disappearing. Some critics say he romanticises poverty—“I’ve been accused of beautifying poverty or war,” he says. “I may be wrong, but I think it’s always good to make pictures that people want to look at.” His work empathises with its subjects, accepting the value of each individual, without judgment, pity or condescension.
Whether wearing vividly coloured traditional dress, sharp uniforms or rags, his portrait subjects look straight into the lens, giving them a regal air. Their eyes are not downcast; they bore into you and you must respect their humanity. They are mostly serious. Rather than saying “look at me!” they are bearing witness: “see me.”
West Bengal, India (1983), top. His work empathises with its subjects, accepting the value of each individual, without judgment, pity or condescension. Chiang Mai, Thailand (2010), above.
“My main interest is people, human behaviour, human emotions,” he says. “How we all live life in slightly different ways but fundamentally we’re all part of this human family. You can show the humanity in people and not show them as caricatures. The common denominator is the people that I am inspired by. I think that that creates a certain chemistry between them and me and they sense that I have this genuine interest in them as a person. I’m not looking at them as the ‘other’ or as a curiosity but as a fellow human being.”
While some of his images capture fleeting moments, for others, especially the portraits, McCurry takes the time to get to know the people he’s photographing. Even faced with language barriers, “if people sense that your intentions are honourable and that you’re a decent person, people will generally agree to be photographed. The amount of time it takes, it could be short or not. There isn’t a formula. I never want to impose myself or force somebody. I like people to look into my lens and that only really works if people are at ease,” he says.
Even McCurry’s shots of landscapes or cityscapes tend to include humans. They provide a sense of scale, he explains—Buddhist monks before a precarious boulder on a cliff’s edge in Kyaiktiyo, Myanmar. A solitary man walking along a lush, terraced slope in Scotland. Three tiny monks before a monolithic temple in Mandalay, Myanmar.
Often, too, the humans provide a contrasting pop of colour. The red dress and sky-blue headscarf of a woman peeling potatoes on her balcony with the bombed-out devastation of 1982 Beirut behind her. The crimson turban of a man on a steam train, the Taj Mahal glowing as white behind him as the clouds of steam rising from below him. A woman in a scarlet sari, alone against the repeating geometric brown steps of Abhaneri, India.
Beirut, Lebanon (1982), top. The subject’s colourful clothing contrasts with the city’s devastation. Afghan Girl, Peshawar, Pakistan (1984), above, is McCurry’s most famous photo.
While humans dominate the Iconic exhibition, animals also appear—indeed, “I did a whole book on animals,” he says. A man and an elephant in Chiang Mai, Thailand, are a study in browns against a swath of green grass. An oil-soaked bird swimming in a spill off the coast of Saudi Arabia in 1991, its bewildered red eyes the only colour.
Rich colour is a hallmark of a McCurry photo. His portraits feel like cousins to the works of 16th century Italian painter Caravaggio, 17th century Dutch master Rembrandt or the techniques of chiaroscuro, with the subjects almost glowing and exquisitely detailed, while the background is murkier. But the intense colour appears even in landscape shots. In the days of film, McCurry used Kodachrome, and he could achieve intense colours by slightly underexposing the shots. This is your first McCurry photography tip: underexpose a little for deeper colour. “It’s a simple thing,” he says. Digital cameras, even those on smartphones, are able to capture detail even at extremely low light, opening up opportunities that film couldn’t handle, he notes.
With phone-cameras in our pockets, everyone today is a photographer. Social media and the Internet have raised the bar for taking good photos. “They help to be more visually literate,” McCurry says. But, he warns, just as our emails and texts aren’t great literature, so, too, most of our photos aren’t great photography. Here is your second Steve McCurry photography tip: Appreciate those photos for the people and the memories in them, rather than for any artistic value. “Not everybody had a camera 30, 40, 50 years ago, and even if you did, you probably wouldn’t take the camera to dinner the way we do now. It’s good to photograph your friends, your family events, the birthday party, the lunch, the time somebody stopped by, because those photos in the future will become treasures,” he says. “Go back and print some. When I do photograph people at these meetings, it’s always such a treasure to go back years later and look at how you looked that day, or that encounter. As our kids grow up, document their ordinary life. Maybe it’s not a great picture, but it is a great memory.”
He has tried that with his own daughter, but she, now five, isn’t interested in being photographed, even by a master of the art. “You have to just photograph her as she is,” he says. “She will almost never look into the lens”—thwarting her father’s signature portrait technique. He is thrilled to be a father and husband, and he acknowledges the trade-offs that might have happened, whether to family or to photography, had he had a family when he was younger. “My life would have been very different,” he says. “You never know. But here I am, and it’s all good.”
Al Ahmadi, Kuwait (1991). Between blackened sand and sky, camels search for shrubs and water in the burning oil fields of southern Kuwait.
