Steve McCurry (Philadelphia – April 23, 1950) is an American photographer responsible for some of the most important war zone photographic reports of our time. He achieved world fame with his 1984 photograph “Afghan Girl”, an extraordinary representation of a young Afghan refugee with charming green eyes.
The image first appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic, along with other photographs that Steve McCurry took during his tenure in Afghanistan. He himself tells how he was able to secretly enter the country disguising himself as a local resident, thus arriving before the invasion of the Soviet Union.
After working on Today’s Post at the King of Prussia for two years, Steve Mccurry left for India as a freelance photographer. It was in India that McCurry learned to look and wait for life. “If you can wait,” he said, “people forget your camera and their souls come out.”
Soon, Steve Mccurry starts working for the Magnum Agency, one of the most prestigious photo agencies. He took photos all over the world especially in places devastated by conflicts, trying each time to understand how people could survive so much devastation and pain, at which point portraying faces became an imperative for him, as if he wanted to make manifest to the world such a painful situation. Sent to a thousand war fronts from Beirut to Cambodia, from Kwait to the former Yugoslavia, not to forget Afghanistan.
Steve Mccurry had a very long and successful photographic career and is today probably the most famous photographer in the world.
