Related: Inspired by Light, Color – and Culture: An Homage to the Work of a Master
By Lavonne Leong ’93
This spring one of the world’s most celebrated photographers, Steve McCurry, visited Punahou as part of the School’s Creative Greats program, which is supported by the Class of 1950 Distinguished Speakers Fund. He was on campus for almost a week, engaging with faculty, students and the wider community through classroom visits, meetings, and a gallery exhibit at the Bishop Learning Commons.
“Steve is more than a photographer,” says Academy Art faculty member Alex Selarque, who has been teaching photography at Punahou for nearly 30 years. “He’s an artist, in that he’s very intentional. His photographs are not just landscapes, not just photojournalism, not just portraits – he’s capturing relationships. The relationship of individuals to each other, to a culture, to an environment, and that relationship has been his theme all his life.”
World-renowned photographer Steve McCurry participated in a host of activities during his visit to Punahou, including a book signing at an exhibit of his famous works in the Bishop Learning Commons and a well-attended talk story session with the community in Thurston Memorial Chapel.
McCurry has been the toast of the photography world for almost five decades, earning accolades such as the Robert Capa Gold Medal for photography and multiple World Press Photo Awards for his powerful storytelling. He’s been appointed a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Minister of French Culture and has been given the Centenary Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Royal Photographic Society in London. He is so closely associated with mastery of color photography that he was chosen to shoot the last roll of Kodachrome film ever produced.
A Life in Pictures
McCurry is the maker of what CNN has called the “world’s most famous photograph.” When the fierce green gaze of “Afghan Girl,” 12-year-old refugee Sharbat Gula, appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985, it turned the attention of the world to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting refugee crisis.
“Afghan Girl” made an impression on a generation, many of whom name that photograph as the first time they realized the power an image could hold. And McCurry kept wandering the world and making images that combined the immediacy of photojournalism with the power of artistry – with a profound work ethic of continuous attention to detail and improvement that has kept him in the elite ranks of world photographers.
McCurry has produced countless iconic images of the beauty, breadth and variety of the human experience: A black steam engine passing in front of a ghostly, timeless Taj Mahal; a procession of Buddhist nuns, their pink umbrellas and robes contrasting with the brilliant orange and blue building behind them; a boy in Kathmandu, napping outdoors against a cow who curls protectively around him; a black-haired girl in Indonesia with a pearl earring leaning against a fence in her front yard, gazing calmly at the photographer while waist high in duckweed-covered floodwater; and the celebrated portraits of young and old, joyful and serious, from all over the world, gazing at the viewer in ways that are hard to forget. The artistry and impact of his work have elevated McCurry to iconic status.
This level of meteoric success was never a foregone conclusion when he started out. “I barely finished high school,” he told a group of laughing Academy students in Selarque’s Advanced Photography Class. Born and raised in Philadelphia, McCurry attended Penn State University before joining a local newspaper as a photographer. After two years, he took his savings and followed his curiosity to India, where he began to photograph a region and a people that he felt a strong connection with. “I left on a six-week trip and ended up spending two years there,” he says.
After several months, McCurry expanded his travels, crossing into Pakistan, where he encountered a group of Afghan refugees who had fled the Soviet invasion of their country. They urged him to cross the border into Afghanistan to document their plight and get their story out to the world. The resulting photographs, which eventually included “Afghan Girl,” catapulted McCurry to international fame and provided him with the direction for his life’s work.
Over his prolific career, McCurry has traversed the globe and captured images, ranging from the intimate to the majestic, that have etched themselves into the collective consciousness of our era. “For me, the goal is to find some sort of universality among people across a huge variety of conditions,” says McCurry. “If I am successful, my artwork should be universally understood by anyone who has experienced the human condition, regardless of their circumstances.”
Talking to the Community
During his visit at Punahou, there were diverse opportunities for the community to interact with McCurry, including an evening at Punahou chapel that was open to the public, titled “The World as a Profound Invitation: Inspiring Young People to Explore the World as a Defining Adventure.”
During the session, attended by almost 300 community members, McCurry took the stage along with childhood friend Michael Carroll and Academy English teacher Tom Gammarino, who moderated the event. Against a riveting slideshow backdrop of dozens of McCurry’s most iconic images, the conversation covered everything from McCurry’s recent travels to examining the question of how to sustain deep engagement across a lifetime.
McCurry recently photographed in Cambodia and Vietnam and has visited Ukraine twice since the Russian invasion in 2022. When asked how he chooses where he will photograph next, McCurry said, “I try to go to places I think are important to photograph, that have stories that are important to tell.” Carroll added that seeing common humanity through art can be a way of humanizing conflict, a peacemaking gesture that is “an expression of decency, or goodness. To the degree to which art is not aggression but open, tender, willing, alert, it is an expression of sanity.”
Carroll, McCurry’s longtime friend, said that the essential question of McCurry’s career is: “What does it mean to be human?” He continued, “It’s the adventure of being human, the adventure of being alive. It’s profound, and it’s right in front of you. It’s about living an authentic life rather than an artificial one.” McCurry agreed, adding, “If we can see other people and other cultures, see the commonality and the common humanity – we can see that they’re like you and me. That has great value.”
The talk then turned to craft and career, both McCurry’s own and the Academy photography students he had been working with during the week. As a self-described “professional wanderer and explorer,” McCurry stressed that although travel had animated his work, it wasn’t a necessary component of a photographer’s art. Through a camera lens, said McCurry, “you can explore your family, your neighborhood, your region. You don’t have to get in a car or on a bike or on a plane.”
He reminisced about his own start – the first photograph he remembers taking was of a local dog, and the first “good” photograph, of a living room set in a furniture store. From those humble photographic beginnings, McCurry grew steadily as a photographer, honing his craft until his canvas ultimately became the world, itself. “I can’t imagine doing anything other than wandering, exploring, shooting,” said McCurry.