The Forgotten Face of the Afghan Girl
In advance of the opening of Steve McCurry’s exhibition at Beetles+Huxley next week, we would like to share with you the often-overlooked story of his world famous photograph, the Afghan Girl, Peshawar, Pakistan, 1984. In 1984 McCurry was approached by National Geographic to photograph the refugee camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. He visited 30 camps just outside Peshawar and although some of the camps had been established for years, there was still only basic shelter and facilities. In the Nasir Bagh camp McCurry found a tent that had been set up as a girls’ school. Fifteen girls were having lessons but he noticed one girl with particularly startling green eyes. McCurry recalls: ‘I spotted this young girl. She had an intense, haunted look, a really penetrating gaze – and yet she was only about twelve years old. She was very shy, and I thought if I photographed other children first she would be more likely to agree because at some point she wouldn’t want to be left out. I guess she was as curious about me as I was about her, because she had never been photographed and had probably never seen a camera. After a few moments she got up and walked away, but for an instant everything was right – the light, the background, the expression in her eyes.’ That moment when ‘everything was right’ resulted in arguably the most widely recognised photograph of the twentieth century. The famous image was not, however, originally chosen for publication. Another showing the young girl covering her lower face of with her shawl was picked but the magazine’s editor, Bill Garrett, reviewed the ‘seconds’ from McCurry’s shots and decided that the now-famous image should be used for the magazine’s cover. ‘Readers loved it,’ Garratt remembers, ‘the response was immediate. Steve took this young girl’s picture one morning in a refugee camp in Pakistan, and he created an image that has captivated millions of people around the world. Those haunting green eyes just stared out from the magazine cover, capturing the girl’s plight and our gaze.’ Whereas the shot initially selected shows a shy but playful young girl, wary of the foreign photographer who had interrupted her classes, the published image conveys a stoic determination in the girl’s disarming gaze at odds with the her youth. The photograph made her a symbol of both the human plight of conflict in the Middle East and of perseverance against adversity. McCurry would return to Pakistan in 2002 with a National Geographic television film crew to find the woman who had catalysed his career. He learnt for the first time that her name was Sharbat Gula and that she was living in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan, where American forces had been bombing. She made the treacherous journey across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to be reunited with the photographer. McCurry’s 2002 photographs of Gula appeared in a feature in National Geographic. The magazine funded her husband’s and her trip to Mecca on the Hajj. McCurry founded the Afghan Girl’s Fund to work with non-profit organisations to help young women in Afghanistan. In 2008 the organisation widened its scope to include boys and changed its name to the Afghan Children’s Fund. The exhibition will see McCurry’s Afghan Girl and his Afghan Girl Hiding her Face on show side by side for the first time in the United Kingdom. Steve McCurry will be on view at Beetles+Huxley from 24 February to 19 March 2016.
