A perfect end of this Labor Day weekend: Culture, love and great weather…

Love at first sight and an emotional roller coaster was definitively seeing the expo of Steve Mc Curry to me. And an awakening of my wanderlust. India, Cambodja, Sri Lanka, Tibet…. If you haven’t heard of his name, you probably have seen the portrait of the Afghan girl which has become one of the most celebrated and well-known portraits of the contemporary photography. Steve McCurry is a a National Geographic photographer and I absolutely could not miss the opportunity to go to Antwerp and see his retrospective ‘The World of Steve McCurry’ at Waagnatie. Especially because the exhibition promised to take me on a journey of deep-rooted cultures and conflicts on five continents. This is definitively food for my soul…

Here is the story about one of his most famous shots: the Afghan girl with the green eyes: Shabbat Gula.

The photo was shot in 1984 at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp, showing a 12-year-old Afghan girl. Apparently her parents were killed during a Soviet air raid in her native village. So, she had to flee to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and lived there with hundreds of other refugees.
McCurry had just started his career. In a local girls’ school he saw the beautiful girl with the green burning eyes. He made several shots of the girl and said he knew that he made a great shot. Of course, he could never know that it was going to become a historic photo and bring him worldwide recognition. Soon after the photo was published by the National Geographic it was named “the most recognized photograph” in the history of the magazine. The photo represents “the trauma and plight, and the whole situation about people having to flee”. Timeless….The girl had to break through the mountains and forests with her grandmother, brother, and three sisters for nearly two weeks and stayed in two other refugee camps before she made it, all of this at 11 years old…

After that Mc Curry wanted to find her again and went to the surrounding regions twice during the 90s, but unfortunately he was unsuccessful. In 2002 he went to the same refugee camp and showed the locals the girl’s photo on the 1985 magazine cover. One of them knew her brother and traveled to her native village to get her. The woman’s eyes had to be checked using iris recognition to be sure that it was the right person. Her name was Sharbat Gula and when she was found, at about 29, she said that up until that moment she has never seen her photo and she had never known that it turned into an iconic image. However, she remembered the moment when she was taken the photo very clearly as it was the first time ever she was photographed. Actually, the second time when she was taken a photo in her life was during reuniting with McCurry in 2002, 17 years later after her famous portrait shot was made. Can you recognize that little girl? I think it is such an amazing story.

His pictures are all very inspiring, emotional and painful at times. But they illustrate his focus: no matter how raw the context, you can always see and feel the human emotions in his pictures. He quotes that his life is dictated by his drive to walk around somewhere and to observe and that his camera is his passport – Wauw…I’m in love….