Steve McCurry fills the Martorell Palace with icons of a world in conflict

For the North American photographer Steve McCurry (Philadelphia, 1950), images have been his “diary” and the “testimony” of everything he has experienced during his travels through countries such as India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Madagascar, Mauritania, Japan, Yemen, Kuwait, and the United States itself. Some of his images have been etched into collective memory, especially the Afghan girl, which was the cover of the magazine National Geographic in 1985. Another of McCurry’s best-known images is that of the oil wells on fire during the first Gulf War, which, moreover, caused an ecological disaster. But he also claims the value of the rest of his photographs.

“We live in a fascinating world, and in all photographs you can see different people, places, and stories,” he said on Thursday at the Palau Martorell in Barcelona during the presentation of the exhibition Steve McCurry. Icons, which will be open until September 6. The exhibition, with more than 150 images from his entire career, is the most ambitious dedicated to him in Barcelona. Beyond these icons, McCurry asserts that in all his images,

In forty years of career, rather than evolving, McCurry has remained true to himself. “He is very coherent with himself. He has several languages, because there is a more meditative Steve and another who is more action-oriented, but there is always great coherence,” states the exhibition’s curator, Biba Giacchetti. “He doesn’t like being associated with National Geographic very much because, obviously, the magazine has used the photograph of the Afghan girl excessively everywhere; that’s why he tries not to work with National Geographic anymore. He has never been a staff photographer: he was a photographer who worked on personal projects and sold them,” recalls Giacchetti.

For the curator, it is not contradictory that McCurry has portrayed disadvantaged people from all over the world with an aesthetically very powerful language, characterized by saturated colors and impressive compositions that often recall paintings. Precisely, the Italian art historian Vittorio Sgarbi related The Afghan Girl to a portrait by the Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina. “McCurry has a very strong aesthetic: he trained at the University of Pennsylvania. Initially, he wanted to make films, but he realized that photography gave him more freedom. He started working for a local newspaper and then began to travel, selling reports to earn a living. He has a very clear aesthetic vision, which is part of his mental framework, and it also comes from the study of great photographers,” explains Giacchetti.

“The first person who influenced him was Brian Brake, with a book about monsoons that deeply marked him. His first project was also about monsoons, and that took him to India –details the curator–. Afterwards, traveling through the north, he discovered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and documented it, when almost no one was talking about it, which gave him international projection and entry into Magnum. One of his great strengths is working on long-term projects, connecting stories in different places. He has published books on Buddhism and other topics, always with this transversal vision.”

The exhibition occupies the three floors of the palace, and the route has the particularity that Giacchetti has mixed photographs from different countries and times. “The only thing we have done is harmonize them, create a conversation between the images regarding the photographed people, because within the exhibition there are many different situations –says the curator–. There are photos with great energy, others are spiritual and some have a strong poetic charge. There are also very hard, very difficult photographs”. Another distinctive feature of McCurry is that he does not show the most graphic photographs or those that present explicit violence, but rather relies on the suggestive capacity of the images. “We see a photograph of a child miner in Afghanistan and with his gaze and his face it is enough”, points out the curator. Thus, images of wars and animals fleeing natural disasters can be seen.

In another of these more subtle images, a man can be seen traveling by motorcycle with a large dog in the luggage rack. Where was he taking it? To participate in a dogfight. “Steve doesn’t like to show the most dramatic photos. He thinks you can have a thought, a reflection, without seeing the most pornographic images from the point of view of drama. He doesn’t show you the animals tearing each other apart, because these photographs are also wonderful, but you can’t look at them, they hurt you”, concludes the curator. And sometimes there are surprising images: one of the most striking is that of a child pointing a gun at his head. But McCurry himself explained that he photographed him after a scuffle with some other children and that, after taking the photo, he went back to playing as if nothing had happened.

The initial room is dedicated to portraits, made of children and adults in countries such as Burma, India and Afghanistan. “The importance of McCurry’s portraits lies in the ability of the subjects to look you in the eye. It seems that they are the ones looking at us. They are people from different latitudes, but humanity is the same”, says Giacchetti. Another key element is the effort to dignify the people he photographs. “There is a direct relationship with the subject, and dignity is the most important thing. His protagonists, even in difficult situations, have great strength: they are kings and queens. They don’t elicit pity; they attract you, they move you, but from their dignity”, she emphasizes.

The tour continues with a room focused on spirituality. “He has followed Tibetans and other contexts with a strong spiritual dimension very closely. There are photographs from different countries, such as Burma, China, Cambodia, and India, but the theme is the same. McCurry’s great thesis is that, beyond cultural differences, feelings belong to a single humanity,” says the curator. Next, there is a room about the situation of women in Afghanistan, full of women covered with burqas. “The photographs are so harsh that they cannot be mixed with other images, they need their own space,” warns Giacchetti.

Images of worlds in extinction

As can be seen below, India is one of McCurry’s most beloved countries. He has documented the contradictory nature of the monsoons: they are destructive, yet at the same time many populations would not survive without the water they provide. Another of his most emblematic images is that of a man with water up to his neck, carrying the sewing machine with which he earns his living. When the machine’s brand saw the photograph on the cover of National Geographic, they went to find him in Porbandar to give him a new machine. In another image, an old locomotive can be seen with the Taj Mahal in the background, before it became a tourist theme park. “One of his obsessions is to document disappearing worlds, to leave a record for future generations: places, people, ethnicities. He has worked a lot with nomads because they are disappearing: borders and urbanization cause them to mix and differences to fade. He wants to show common humanity, but also differences,” says Giacchetti.

Another of the exhibition’s major sections is dedicated to childhood. For various reasons, McCurry has a very special relationship with it. “His childhood was difficult: he lost his mother and had an accident that affected his hand, which didn’t grow fully. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but that makes him especially empathetic with children. Furthermore, a few years ago he had a daughter, Lucia (he is 76 and she is 8), and that has strengthened this perspective. He has taken her all over the world and that has greatly influenced his work. His wife is much younger,” says Giacchetti.

For McCurry, childhood is “key: it is the dawn of life, and education is the only path to freedom. He supports Afghan girls so they can study: if you can’t read, you have no voice,” he explains. Regarding the famous Afghan girl, Sharbat Gula, the curator recalls that if she had been able to have an education, “she could have been an ambassador for peace,” but she wanted to remain in her “traditional” life. Again, one can see poor girls who look like “little princesses”, as well as an Afghan school of the Hazara ethnic group – highly persecuted – and another of young Tibetan monks. At the end of the exhibition, there is a room dedicated to animals, among which is a monkey with a lot of character. Immediately after, one can see a photograph of the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers and another of the devastation from the Kobe (Japan) earthquake in 1995.

The controversy of digital retouching and the challenge of AI

Throughout his career, Steve McCurry has won four World Press Photo awards. But in 2016, he caused a stir when Italian photographer Paolo Viglione discovered digital retouching in a photograph McCurry had taken in Havana. Following these and other incidents, McCurry defines himself primarily as “a storyteller” rather than a documentarian. He now acknowledges that the biggest challenge in photojournalism is artificial intelligence (AI) and that “authorship of photographs” should be championed. “You can ask ChatGPT to create a photograph of the war in Ukraine, for example, and it will show you a very dramatic and convincing image, but it won’t be real. AI should make us question the authorship of the image. Who is the author: the painter, the photographer? We always have to ask ourselves what we know. If there is a person behind it, I trust it,” he explains.