STEVE MCCURRY (1950 ) Afghan Girl

Sale 2436 - Lot 188

Unsold

Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000

STEVE MCCURRY (1950- )
Afghan Girl. Fujicolor Crystal Archive print, the image measuring 19 1/2x13 inches (49.5x33 cm.), the sheet 20x16 inches (50.8x40.6 cm.), with McCurry's signature, in ink, and the serial number 42497, in pencil, on verso. 1984; printed 1990s

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Additional Details

From Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, New York; to a Private East Coast Collector, in the 1990s.

In 1979 McCurry, disguised in traditional clothes, agreed to document the civil war in Afghanistan. He crossed the border from Pakistan in May 1979--just a few months before the Soviet Union invaded. McCurry was one of the first photographers to record the extreme brutality happening in Afghanistan during this time.

This portrait of Sharbat Gula, an Afghan teenager living in the refugee camp Nasir Bagh in Pakistan in 1984, appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985. It quickly became one of the most recognizable portraits in the world, and brought McCurry a great deal of acclaim.

McCurry had neglected to write down the name of the young woman he had photographed, and searched for her unsuccessfully throughout the 1990s. In 2002, a team of National Geographic journalists were able to locate Gula in the remote mountainous region of Afghanistan called Tora Bora, and were able to confirm her identity using the iris pattern of her striking eyes.

In her 2002 National Geographic piece about the reunion of McCurry and Gula, Cathy Newman wrote of Sharbat Gula: "She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since."

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