Steve McCurry is one of the most distinguished pictorial journalists in the world. With his iconic portrait of the Afghan refugee child Sharbat Gula, the American photographer created one of the most famous covers of the National Geographic magazine and reported pictorially on the major international trouble spots.
(...) Continue readingSteve McCurry began his career in Afghanistan
Steve McCurry was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 23 April 1950. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Pennsylvania State University in 1974, and then worked for two years for the local paper The Daily Collegian. During this time, he discovered his love for photography and began his first reportage trips. After a stay in India, he visited Pakistan where two Afghans told him about the war in their homeland. Steve McCurry donned Afghanistan clothes, sewed film rolls into his turban, and hid further material in his socks and underwear. He then stole over the Pakistan border and documented the immense devastation caused by the war in Afghanistan (1979-1989) and the misery it caused for the local population. The pictures were printed by several international newspapers, news magazines and illustrated magazines such as the New York Times, Time Magazine and Paris Match and brought Steve McCurry sudden fame.
Bringing the truth about war and injustice to light
In the years that followed, Steve McCurry photographed numerous military conflicts, followed the First and Second Golf Wars and the collapse of Yugoslavia, and reported from trouble spots around the world in Beirut, Cambodia, the Yemen and Tibet. Steve McCurry is not concerned with delivering sensations with his photographic work, but with making visible the bloody toll of war for the people affected: The suffering of war concerns a shared, universal element that is common to all people, irrespective of geographic, ethnic or cultural location. The photographer wants to tell what he feels must be told, what must not be concealed, what contributes to the definition of conditio humana. The camera also takes the form of a shield for McCurry, protecting him in dangerous and unsettling moments and offering him security. He does not see himself as an adventurer or an adrenaline junkie, but as a chronicler and servant of truth for all human society.
Controversy over the digital manipulation of images
In 2016, Steve McCurry was at the center of a sensational controversy around his proven manipulation of images. Faced with the undeniable facts, the photographer undertook a reassessment of his work: He was not a photojournalist in the true sense of the word, but a visual storyteller who also made use of artistic means of design to meet his aesthetic and compositional demands. However, because of the irritation this had caused among sectors of his audience, he would make only little use of digital image editing in the future. Although Magnum and National Geographic subsequently removed several of McCurry’s pictures from their websites, the reputation of the artist and his life’s work did not change. Steve McCurry has received many prizes and awards for his photographic work, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1980 for his first photo reportage from Afghanistan, the Lucie Award in 2003, and he was admitted to the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2019.
Steve McCurry - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
