STEVE MCCURRY (1950 ) Afghan Girl

Sale 2406 - Lot 198

Unsold

Estimate: $ 12,000 - $ 18,000

STEVE MCCURRY (1950- )
Afghan Girl. Fujicolor Crystal Archive print, 19 1/2x13 inches (49.5x33 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 the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, New York; to a Private East Coast Collector, 1990s.

Contemporary American photographer Steve McCurry is widely respected for his transcendent, beautiful images from around the world. He continues to travel extensively. "The fields of photography and photojournalism have been permanently shaped by McCurry's vivid imagery and the universal themes represented in his work," writes Christopher Phillips, Curator at the International Center of Photography.

In 1979, McCurry, disguised in traditional clothes, agreed to document the civil war in Afghanistan, and 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."