McCURRY, Steve - Afghanistan

Background information

"Steve McCURRY is one of the most famous photographers of our time. His international breakthrough came with the photographs he took in 1979 during the conflict in Afghanistan. Since then, he has visited the country in the Hindu Kush again and again. This volume presents his Afghanistan photographs from four decades. For some people, the country might seem pretty close to paradise; for everyone else, since it became the object of geostrategic interests in the 'Great Game' between Russia and England, it has shown itself to be a desolate and rocky killing field and chaos of endless insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, colonial and civil wars, and religious terror.

American photographer Steve McCURRY first traveled to the country in 1979, when the Soviet Union intervened militarily in the intra-Afghan conflicts, to report - dressed in the country's typical costume - on the fight of the Mujahideen against occupiers and troops loyal to the government. In 1980, he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his photographs from this conflict, which made him famous worldwide. Since then, the multiple award-winning photographer, who sees himself not as a photojournalist but as a 'visual storyteller', has traveled again and again to the country on the Hindu Kush to report on its people and their everyday lives, and has become an intimate connoisseur of the country and the region. 

Content

Steve McCURRY's large-format book of photographs, 'Afghanistan,' features images from four decades of Afghanistan, portraits and landscapes, stunning, atmospherically dense images from a country that, regardless of war and destruction, has retained a startling beauty. His famous portrait of an Afghan girl, he photographed in a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1984. This portrait gained immense popularity as a projection screen for Western fantasies and became McCURRY's signature shot." (© Taschen Verlag, 2017)

About the American photographer, Steve McCURRY (b. 1950, in Philadelphia)

Photo books by and about the work of Steve McCURRY