Steve McCurry Research Center

FAQ

Q: Which photographer influenced you the most?

Henri Cartier-Bresson. His pictures provide wonderful insight into the personality of his subjects. They are journalistic, but they transcend journalism. They're timeless.

Q: Your photograph of the Afghan girl has become an icon of modern photography. How did you come to take it?

When I was covering the border conflict in Afghanistan in the early eighties, I went into a school in a refugee camp in Pakistan and asked the teacher for permission to photograph the girls; I just had a short time to do this.

This girl's village had been destroyed; she'd been walking for several days and was traumatized by what she'd seen and experienced.

Q: How did you get so involved in Afghanistan?

When I was in Pakistan in 1979, just wandering around doing small odds-and-ends magazine assignments, I met some Afghan refugees in a small village called Chitral in northern Pakistan. They told me their villages were being destroyed and wanted me to help get the word out. So they smuggled me into Afghanistan with the hopes that I would be able to give them some kind of press coverage. It was an amazing experience, being under mortar fire, machine gun fire, visiting all these people whose villages had been destroyed. That was really the first time that I got involved with major magazines-Time and Newsweek.

Q: What is your method for earning people's trust before you take their picture? Do you start shooting immediately, or do take it slow?

I think photographing people is simply a question of treating people with dignity and respect, and getting comfortable with people and enjoying talking with them and being with them. Often a sense of humor can work wonders with putting people at ease and making them relaxed.

Q: You've spent a lot of time in India. What's the attraction for you?

India was the first place that I really started working intensely. I just think it's so different from how I grew up. You have this extreme range of class and caste and rich and poor, and people tend to live their lives out on the street, whereas in the U.S. people tend to do everything indoors. There's just a fascination. Sometimes it's shocking, but it's always interesting.

Q: Did the travel or photography come first?

The travel predates my photography. After high school I went to live in Europe for a year. I did some traveling, a little bit in Europe, the Mideast, Africa, Central America. I have a feeling that it could have been a need to travel and have this gypsy existence that led me into photography.

Q: Was there something about your upbringing that made you want to seek out more chaotic, less orderly places?

I was always kind of active and a bit rebellious. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't travel anywhere until I was 19. I think maybe it was all a bit too bland. I figured I'd go to a new part of the world where I hadn't been. I was going to spend three months in India, and then I was going to go to Cyprus or Turkey. But I ended up spending two years in India without ever coming back.

Q: When did you first get into photography?

When I was at Penn State, I started out studying film history-cinematography-and went from that to filmmaking and graduated with a degree in theater arts. While I was in filmmaking, I started doing a lot of still photography and working for the school newspaper and drifted into doing stills for films. I started looking at a lot of photography books-by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Once I got out of school, I never was involved in filmmaking again.

Q: What's your strategy for shooting a place?

When I first get to a new city or country, I like to spend some time just looking around, finding out what's unique or special about that place from anywhere else in the world. I try and find that special nature of a place. If it's Yemen, I might want to look through the different villages and find out which one is the most interesting, which one is the most appealing, which one is the best example of architecture. I might go through five or ten villages and say, okay, this one looks the most interesting. Once I find out what makes a place tick, then I delve into it photographically. In the beginning, I'm just kind of surveying.

Q: There's a certain romance associated with the foreign correspondent/expat life. What's it really like out there? What's the best part, and what's the worst part?

The worst part is the customs and departure lounges and checking in and out of hotels.

I think the best part is exploring new cultures and being in places you can't ever imagine you'd be in, going down a river in Burma in a canoe or going into a teak forest with loggers on elephant-back or traveling around Afghanistan by camel. Seeing how we all live our lives a little bit differently is as important a way as there is to spend a part of your life.

Q: Why do you have to be on the road? Why did you find your career out there?

I think it's just a sense of adventure and discovery and exploration, exploring new places. To me it's fascinating to learn about these differences in how we all are basically the same.