Graham Young meets photographer Steve McCurry as his work goes on display here.
It’s currently impossible to walk or drive through Birmingham without seeing posters of an image which has defined the career of international photographer Steve McCurry.
Afghan Girl (1984) is such a world famous portrait it’s perhaps no coincidence that such a striking contrast of red and green should also be the way opticians fine-tune prescriptions.
Almost as if you are getting warmer as you approach the real thing, the biggest Steve McCurry Retrospective poster hangs outside Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s main entrance.
Inside the nearby Waterhall, a proper print of the picture is one of 80 images in one of four different McCurry exhibitions in Europe this summer.
Born in Philadelphia, he graduated cum laude (with highest honours) from the College of Arts and Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University.
His own website states: “After working at a newspaper for two years, he left for India to freelance.
“Here he learned to watch and wait on life.
“If you wait,” he realised, “people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view”.
Still travelling widely today, he retains an open mind and remains determined to improve his technique.
If Afghan Girl is the one image which gets everyone talking, McCurry has no problems with that. With providence, he knows the best might yet be to come.
Now 60, McCurry didn’t pick up a camera in earnest until he was 22.
Left handed but right-eyed when it comes to peering through his Nikon viewfinders, his colours draw you in like an insect to a flower.
Working mostly when denser light is available at either end of the day, his Retrospective images were all captured on Kodachrome film.
While McCurry specialises in reporting on cultures strikingly different to life in the West, images which feature human subjects are particularly compelling.
Often working on assignment for the world-renowned Magnum agency, McCurry has the knack of finding people whose personalities have not only been concentrated by their lives but whose eyes are often haunted by it, too.
When we meet up in the Waterhall, it’s instantly clear that a man who has spent a lifetime capturing the stillness in others has developed a deep, becalming presence within himself.
Together for two hours, which feels like five minutes, we begin by studying half a dozen of his pictures.
“I love the sky... the composition... the balance of shapes,” he tells me.
Each picture might have been taken with one push of a single button, but their tantalisingly simple yet captivatingly complex nature means that it takes a lifetime of knowledge and dedication to do it like this.
The view of Sri Lankan fishermen sitting on top of sticks in 1995 makes it look as if he’s above the ocean with them and ready to risk losing his camera to a wave.
Then there’s the 1966 shot of a mother and daughter begging in the Bombay rain outside the condensation of his taxi window.
“I was in an air-conditioned bubble and took just two pictures. This was the second,” McCurry explains.
In Kabul, 1992, training shoes hang over the backs of several burka-clad women standing at a market stall.
No permission was sought for this picture and he had to be quick, lest any men nearby should feel he had violated the women’s respect.
And then, from 1994, there’s Afghan Girl, the ultimate still portrait of a compellingly-shy refugee at Nasire Bagh camp, Peshawar, Pakistan.
Her burka even had holes burned into it from a cooker.
Had she ever seen a camera before?
“I don’t think so,” says McCurry. “But she agreed for me to take the picture even though I don’t think she really knew what I was doing.
“People have responded to that picture over the years and it’s only been positive. They feel very connected with it, I think.
“It was taken with natural light and the only work done on it was a little bit of ‘dodge and burn’ technique to bring out her hair.
“If that picture overshadows all of my other work, then so be it.”
Years later in 2002 and against the odds, McCurry found his subject again for a post 9/11 TV documentary. And for his April 2002 National Geographic front cover, he finally learned her name: Sharbat Gula.
Originally from what McCurry calls ‘the most warlike of Afghan tribes, the Pashtun’, Sharbat had been aged about six when her parents were killed by Soviet bombs.
Her grandmother led Sharbat, her sisters and their brother Kashar Khan to comparative safety via the shelter of caves across a snow-capped mountain range.
Still alive and back in today’s Afghanistan, Sharbat is now thought to be aged around 36-38 and is a mother with three surviving children out of four.
Through his regular translator, McCurry heard just three weeks ago that she was still well.
But her country remains at war... with western terrorist hunters instead of Soviet invaders.
If McCurry ever thought his lifestyle in New York’s Greenwich Village was wholly removed from Afghanistan, events in September 2001 changed things forever.
Having returned from Tibet just hours earlier, the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers kick-started the “war on terror” right on his own doorstep, where the irresistible chance to capture some of the most dramatic pictures of his life was a mere 20 minutes’ walk away.
As a man who has dodged many a bullet in war zones abroad, McCurry is uniquely qualified to see both sides of the fight.
He understands why a Western coalition is in Afghanistan fighting for international security, but questions how successful that mission can ever be.
“It was a good point to go in after 9/11,” he says. “But we’re never going to ‘win’ this. It’s just not happening.”
McCurry doubts whether the Afghan Army really can be trained to take over the country.
“Why haven’t the other tribes stepped up and been more aggressive?,” he reasons. “The Pashtun and Taliban have struggled through their culture.
“They have this perception that (the war on terror) is a conspiracy to change their way of life and that the coalition is against Islam and wants to take its resources. We know we are not trying to change their religion, but they don’t know that.
“What incentive do they have? Our strategy should be to offer them incentives and to bring them into the political process. They will fight forever to defend their own community, town, religion and country. When a 19-year-old is told he’ll be rewarded with a gun, it’s then seductive for them to kill foreigners.”
Describing how he has faced death in the eye himself, McCurry says: “It’s a terrible feeling when you think ‘This is it, I’ve gone too far this time... why have I got myself into this position?’
“Over the years I’ve been very skilful at disguising myself. And I’ve had quite a lot of luck.”
In the serenely filtered light of the Waterhall, McCurry concludes: “This is a wonderful space and my work has been presented very well.”
With so much to see, visitors take its stuffy heat on a bright, sunny day in their stride.
Most don’t realise McCurry is in their midst and enjoying watching their reactions.
But a combination of some TV footage of McCurry in the corner and my presence interviewing him mean that some do.
One Canadian woman reveals how her copy of the National Geographic Afghan Girl edition is “the only one I’ve never thrown away”.
More than one person asks him personally if more seats can’t be provided for the screen which is playing the Sharbat Gula documentary.
Whether in print, in the flesh or on screen, he’s a compelling presence. And we were lucky to have him before he flew back home to New York.
