Lovely Steve McCurry Photos

[x_los]

black_rider  poster this NPR link, which made me remember what a great photographer Steve McCurry (the man who took the famous National Geographic photo 'Afghan Girl') is. I've been on a trawl through his stuff, and there's some gorgeous ones below. If you have an awesome photo to drop in the comments, please, be my guest!


















Though, divorced from context, do gorgeous photos of strange places count as exoticism? :/ Surely it's better to engage with the beauty of places I'll probably never get to see. I did think it a bit weird when, trawling through google images, I found a lot of American chicks posting self-portraits avec shawls after Afghan Girl. There's something disconcerting about their department store shawls and limp expressions, which compare so unfavorably with the startling, somewhat terrifying intensity of the eyes of the original subject. And it's odd (possibly appropriation?) to take a famous photo of Sharbat Gula, a prematurely-old twelve year old war refugee, "a symbol both of the 1980s Afghan conflict and of the refugee situation worldwide," as Wikipedia puts it, and... do it as unironic self-portraiture? With no real reference to the content of the original?

Comments

[evilawyer.livejournal.com]

"Odd" is not strong enough a word, but then again I'm harsher than you are. The photo of the young Afghan girl said, in its composition as well as its context, something about an issue of social importance (or perhaps, rather sadly, an issue that should be socially important but isn't to the wider and shallower world). That that photo was used as a springboard for what sounds like nothing more than pretend fashion shoots by wanna-be models, some of whom may not know a socially important issue if it came up and bit them on the ass, goes beyond odd. Disrespectful and arrogant are words that come to my mind. But then, that's me.