Photographer Steve McCurry, perhaps best known for his National Geographic cover photo of an Afghan woman with haunting eyes, talked with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently about how Afghanistan has changed in the past 30 years.
A woman in Paris looks at a poster of the famous photograph of Sharbat Gula.
McCurry spoke to Muhammad Tahir of RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service about his experiences in Afghanistan and how it has changed since he first visited the country over 30 years ago (see below for audio of full interview).
RFE/RL: You’ve taken hundreds of photographs in Afghanistan, and you said you actually started in Afghanistan, so why did one photo of this little Afghan girl, Sharbat Gula, touch so many people?
Steve McCurry: Well, that’s a very good question, and maybe I’m not the best person to ask that. I know that we had thousands of letters and requests and inquiries about, you know, who was she and how could they help her. People wanted to send her clothes and help, and people wanted to adopt her.
I think there is a quality to her expression which has many different emotions, and she seems — it’s a bit ambiguous, too, what is actually…. But I think that her amazing eyes are probably the main thing which attracts people, and she has these very riveting, beautiful, almost haunted eyes looking at the viewer. So I think that’s possibly the thing which attracts people to that picture.
RFE/RL: After many years, you went back to find this girl. What took you back to find her again?
McCurry: The reason we went back to try and find this girl was because we had received so many letters and inquiries about her. The cover [for “National Geographic” magazine] had been so important and so popular, I was also curious myself if there was some way to find her and try and help her and do something good for her.
So, we went back in 2002 to try and locate her and it was almost like a miracle that we were able to find her.