Face of Asia: Steve McCurry photographs

Afterimage, July-August, 2003 by Nathan Hogan

George Eastman House,

Rochester, New York,

April 19 - August 31, 2003.

Face of Asia is an exhibition of 35mm color photographs by Magnum and National Geographic photojournalist Steve McCurry. Taken over the last twenty-five years, McCurry's images have garnered numerous critical accolades in addition to finding widespread public exposure in the pages of Time, Newsweek, and most prominently, National Geographic. Dispersed throughout the main gallery of the George Eastman House, the 81 large prints--roughly half of them portraits--are grouped together by the geographical location of their origin: Afghanistan, India, Cambodia, and Tibet.

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The centerpiece of the exhibition is McCurry's and National Geographic's most famous image--the green-eyed Afghan Girl portrait (1985). The first of the two main rooms of the gallery is dedicated solely to the iconic image of the then-anonymous Sharbat Gula, and the haunting quality of her by-now familiar stare is undeniably enhanced by the scale and chromatic richness of the large-format print. An adjacent collage of some of the image's many reproductions--on postcards, fundraising placards, calendars, and advertisements--speaks less to the image's universal potency than it does, paradoxically, to its function as an empty signifier. Afghan Girl has become the Migrant Mother of her generation, symbolic of the plight of all the world's 16 million refugees, yet the context of her struggle is more esoteric to McCurry's audience than Migrant Mother was to Dorothea Lange's. Surrounded by its numerous facsimiles, Afghan Girl is a testament to the way in which careless, propagandistic reproduction can dilute the emotional authenticity of any image.

McCurry's other prints likewise portray individuals and scenes from countries that have, over the last 25 years, experienced tremendous social, political, and natural upheaval. Strangely, these circumstances appear largely incidental to McCurry. From his photographs of the lush, peaceful temples of Angkor Wat to those of men in Rajasthan, India, swathed in ceremonial garb, McCurry captures the brightly saturated colors and exotic textures of traditional life without revealing much of his subjects' daily existence. Eugene W. Smith once wrote that, "to portray a city is beyond ending; to begin such an effect is in itself a grave conceit. For though the portrayal may achieve its own measure of truth, it will be no more than a rumour of the city--no more meaningful, and no more permanent." McCurry's photographs present a rumour of Asia that even the most sedentary American has likely caught a whiff of--the exotic becomes a vehicle for formally accomplished compositions that radiate bold, bright colors, but a level of intimacy and obligation to the grind of daily life is jeopardized.

By displaying ephemera like passports and camera lenses, along with numerous biographical anecdotes. Face of Asia creates a portrait of McCurry as the quintessential rugged, American individualist: a macho, Indiana Jones-style photojournalist who battles plane crashes and near-drownings in the world's most dangerous regions in order to capture the perfect image. Ultimately, those images teach us something about color and composition, but relatively little about life in those places that we all need, desperately, to know about--more pressingly now than ever before.