A sumptuous collection of previously unseen images offers a welcome glimpse of other cultures

IN SEARCH OF ELSEWHERE Steve McCurry

Laurence King Publishing, £50

REVIEW BY DAVID PRATT

IN some respects, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the photographer whose work is featured in this book. It was as a young freelance photojournalist newly returned from one of my first overseas assignments covering conflicts in Central America, that I found myself in hospital recovering from a bad bout of malaria and dysentery.

While recuperating I picked up a copy of National Geographic magazine, on the cover of which was Steve McCurry’s now iconic portrait of Sharbat Gula, or the “Afghan Girl” as the picture was simply known back then in 1985.

That photograph and McCurry’s others that accompanied the feature inside were made when Afghanistan was caught in the maelstrom of war following the Soviet invasion there.

It was the marvel of those images that in part took me to Afghanistan, beginning an enduring passion for that country and its people that I know McCurry shares to this day.

This latest rich compendium of McCurry’s work, featuring some 102 previously unseen images spanning almost 40 years, does not depict people caught up in conflict even if a few of the countries they inhabit remain deeply troubled. This, rather, is a book about “the foreign and the familiar,” as travel writer Pico Iyer eloquently explains in his short but poetic introduction to this collection of colour plates reproduced in a largeformat volume.

God knows, rarely has there been a better time than right now, caught in the throes of a global pandemic, to be reminded of the joys brought about by diving into the beauties and the diversity of other cultures. Likewise these images are a wonderfully fulfilling endorsement of the simple but profound things that connect us. In every one of the photographs presented here, what we see is our common humanity.

From Cuba to Nepal, Tibet to Togo and beyond the mundane becomes the marvellous in this collection of cameos whereby a master photographer turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Do not be mistaken, for this is far from merely travel photography as some reviewers have suggested. These images go beyond that genre, which today so often has more to do with Instagram collecting than the lyrical pictorial insights of the human condition that McCurry has made his life’s work.

Many are portraits, an oeuvre for which McCurry is especially renowned. These include the cover image of a Kashmiri man whose astonishing eye colour and intense direct stare into the lens are reminiscent of McCurry’s earlier Afghan Girl.

But there are others here too, compassionate and tender, like that of a tiny boy from Sichuan Province wearing a hat at a horse festival where nomadic Tibetan herders gather to trade and race ponies. Yet another portrait is of an elderly Cuban woman that McCurry met in a chance encounter on a Havana Street, giving us a momentary glimpse into an indomitable spirit.

Colours sing in the pictures while the composition of many, like that of silhouetted boys doing handstands and cartwheels on an incandescent Madagascar beach, are studies in splitsecond timing through the viewfinder.

The sense of location and being right there is evoked in pictures that transcend visual qualities alone. At times it’s as if you can smell these places, hear their distinctive cacophonous sounds, feel the openness, expanse and solitude of great natural landscape or the claustrophobia of shanty life.

Two of my personal favourites in this respect are from 2019 and taken in the vast desert valley of Wadi-Rum in southern Jordan. In one, a lone Bedouin man stands on a rock overlooking an arid and craggy ochre-coloured landscape as if from another time. In the other, a night-time campfire and camel standing nearby had me imagining a Boy’s Own-style adventure set in the