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Like any good poet, McCurry provides little explanation, letting the viewer’s eye rest where it wants the detail is there, waiting for committed eyes. A bare-chested Hamar woman in Ethiopia looks on while the bare torso of a tooth-white mannequin hovers in the background. An orange-seller squats among the rubble of a Kabul street, his back to a mural of a bucolic mountain scene. A burqa’d woman with her ankles showing glides past a tarpaulined car, its bumper exposed. No surprise, then, to discover that he thinks of his art more aligned with poetry.īut what can photography pull from poetry? From words? From rhyme? It does not take a seasoned eye to apply these questions to McCurry’s work, to see the compression and symbolism at work. As Pico Iyer notes in his introduction, his work is less an optic into a place or person, than a meditation. While there are always photographers who rush to compete with painting’s abstraction (think of the cubism inherent in New York photographs, the British pastoral fixation, or the Russian passion for derelict buildings), McCurry has always been more concerned with rhythm, balance. There is, of course, the question of McCurry’s art. While some photos could be attributed to his uncanny knack for incalculable timing (and it’s true to say that he has been present in some of the most photographically important places of the last forty years, including New York on 9/11, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), they are better recognized as the result of dogged persistence. No one can call into question McCurry’s photographic mastery. Not that gawping egoists posed much threat to the McCurry signature, a thousand-yard stare that has become his personal technique for peering into the soul of his subjects. Vistas were squeezed out to make room for full-framed grinning faces over a caption reading “Italy” or “Guatemala” as though, simply by being in a place, we embody it completely.

Travel photography suffered especially, as the subject transitioned from place to traveler, the observer becoming the focal point. With the advent of Instagram and cellphone cameras, the world was swamped with close-quartered self-portraits, images that were nothing less than a desperate attempt to convince ourselves of our presence, and have that presence validated. There was a time when McCurry’s signature photographic style of portraiture seemed in jeopardy not from extinction, but of overpopulation. This review was prepared alongside an interview with Steve McCurry. Please kindly note that unless YOU specifically request anonymity, your comments may be published in Vanguard, with your names and numbers or email addresses attached.Steve McCurry – In Search of Elsewhere: Unseen Images(Laurence King 2020). The trouble with being saddled with a perpetual “sense of elsewhere” is that you will never become a truly authentic or satisfied citizen of anywhere. I’m still based in this country and have had some nice times here but 90 per cent of my experiences have been disappointing and I recently realised that I must return to good old England if I want to be more appreciated and less stressed.īut I now know that I’ll never be entirely liberated from that subtle ‘sense of elsewhere’…and that even if I benefit maximally from rejoining the civilized and meritocratic UK scene, it won’t be long before I start to feel like a square peg in a round hole who left half of a very aching heart in the giant of Africa. I suppose, in a world that is always going through one major disaster or the other, that the average victim of this ”sense of elsewhere” syndrome does not deserve much sympathy because many of us are, despite our possibly tedious complaints, basically OK.

Samuel Johnson, the famed English l8th century Man of Letters, said that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” and Johnson certainly had a point, given that patriotism is frequently used as an excuse for blind loyalty to unworthy governments, rabble rousers or cultural norms…and that patriotism is a favourite cover story for those who wish to indulge in jingoistic outrages.īut I envy people who possess strong, unapologetic allegiances to one country and have an unambiguous and passionate attachment to one particular corner of the globe and don’t walk around thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ Not necessarily mad or bad, but paralysingly sad a lot of the time – and, ultimately, incapable of fitting in anywhere comfortably enough. The painful truth about some of us is that we are psychological cripples, to some extent. €œWherever we go, we will always be unhappy on certain levels because we, alas, will always be there,” was Poage’s grim verdict.