‘I’d say the Taliban are succeeding’
Four decades after Steve McCurry’s photographs changed the way we thought about Afghanistan, he tells Gaby Wood why his latest shots will be his last.
The celebrated Magnum photographer Steve McCurry spends half his time on the road. ‘‘Maybe a lot more than half,’’ he says, considering his nomadic life as we sit in one of the well-stocked storage spaces next to his studio in Long Island City, New York. Compact and energetic, with an ageless demeanour, he has just returned from a week in the Arctic.
‘‘I think every place has value,’’ he reflects, though there are some to which his eye does not respond. ‘‘Sometimes when I’m driving through, say, parts of this country, I find it really depressing and really boring. It’s always the same stores - the Burger Kings and McDonalds and gas stations...’’ he says. ‘‘The drugstore in Alabama is exactly the same as a drugstore in Maine or Washington State. There’s no individuality, there’s no regional flavour, there’s no charm, or poetry or beauty. It’s not something I want to use my limited time left on this planet to explore,’’ he concludes with a shrug. ‘‘I’d rather be in Venice.’’ Charm, poetry, beauty: these are not the usual prerequisites of a war correspondent. But McCurry, who, while travelling in 1979, became accidentally embedded with mujahideen in Afghanistan, has never seen himself as a combat photographer.
‘‘I was always more interested in the refugees than the actual combatants,’’ he says. Famous for his 1984 National Geographic cover of a green-eyed child known as ‘‘the Afghan Girl’’, he now says he is unlikely ever to return to the country he has documented, in intense colour and with unlikely serenity, for 40 years. The moment marks a shift not just in the situation in that part of the world, but in McCurry’s outlook, too. ‘‘At 67,’’ he says, pausing to take in this unfeasible figure, ‘‘I think that whatever you’re gonna do, you’ve gotta get cracking.’’
You might say that McCurry has become the victim of his own eye - if a photographer who has 2.2 million Instagram followers and whose prints fetch up to NZ$270,000 at auction can be called a victim. Though he doesn’t claim to be a historian or an anthropologist, he speaks of photography almost as if it were a medium of the past. He mourns change in the places he loves, while realising that he can’t be seen to be against progress.
‘‘I’m interested in cultures that still have their individuality,’’ he says. He thinks back to the way China was 30 years ago, and says ‘‘it makes your head spin’’. He mentions a unique transportation system that used to be a typical sight on Inle Lake in Burma fishermen would paddle their shallow wooden boats while standing up, with one leg wrapped around the oar. But now they have Chinese motors, and that system is being lost. ‘‘When I was there the last time, in March, I saw one or two people doing that, otherwise it was all motors,’’ McCurry explains.
He pauses to stress that ‘‘people deserve the best possible education and healthcare, obviously. So when that starts to kick in, a lot of these traditional ways disappear.’’ Yet when he sees men in India replacing their old-fashioned clothing with T-shirts and baseball caps, he suggests, ‘‘it’s progress, but there’s a little bit of nostalgia or remorse or melancholy that the way they had adorned themselves for aeons has been set aside in a short few years’’. The formulation of this phrase is telling: the nostalgia McCurry feels is in himself, of course - but he describes it in a generalised way, as if it were already in the world, or something in the air.
The idea that one might be suspicious of the picturesque is not one with which McCurry will engage - this is what he sees, or what he seeks out. Last year, he was criticised for altering some of his prints (a street scene taken in Havana had been imperfectly Photoshopped by his studio in his absence, he explained, after a mini-furore had erupted among journalistic purists). But that - in this digital age and long after McCurry ceased to be a jobbing photoreporter - is not the right issue. Though he has been one of the most highly awarded news photographers of his time, he is no longer in the business of bringing accurate dispatches. His travels are his own idea. He is a purveyor of beautiful views. These are already not quite real underexposed, highly saturated, impeccably framed, as life never is.
The question is whether he is open to what exists, or whether he only travels to places that already look like a Steve McCurry photograph. Can he really be said to portray the world? Just before the altered-image controversy, the novelist Teju Cole lashed out at what he described as McCurry’s ‘‘astonishingly boring’’ output. ‘‘What is wrong with showing a culture in its most authentic form?’’ Cole asked.
He went on: ‘‘The uniqueness of any given country is a mixture not only of its indigenous practices and borrowed customs but also of its past and its present. [...] To consider a place largely from the perspective of a permanent anthropological past, to settle on a notion of authenticity that edits out the present day, is not simply to present an alternative truth: It is to indulge in fantasy.’’
This is, perhaps, less a question of style than longevity. McCurry has been returning to some of the same parts of the world for so long that it is probably inevitable that he should tire of them or miss their former selves.
‘‘I think I’ve said everything I have to say about Afghanistan,’’ he tells me, for instance. ‘‘Life is short. There’s other things I want to experience. It’s like being at a smorgasbord and just sitting at the shrimp bar.’’
The photographs in his latest book, Afghanistan , add up to a rich, near-half-century compendium of reports from that country. The earlier images - from the 1979 trip that launched his career and made the world take notice of a conflict that had until then remained largely hidden, and the visit in 1984 that resulted in his striking portraits, to the desolate bombed-out views of the early Nineties - have more interest and energy to them than the later ones do. They have a sequential, almost operatic story to tell.
This was McCurry bringing news that felt like something between the sublime and a secret the corners of cave dwellings, the desert at sunset, the training of young boys by the mujahideen, women hidden behind the embroidered grilles of their burkas and the searing gazes of children who would, on McCurry’s return, prove to have aged far too fast.
He showed Afghans from Nuristan whose pallor made them look Irish, and Hazara people whose features suggest they were descended from Mongolians. McCurry’s Afghanistan was a heterogeneous place, yet later images reprise those earlier ones. The visual theme was set long ago; these were mere variations.
From a large metal filing cabinet, McCurry pulls out a sheet of slides. It happens to be a set of pictures he took in 1992, around one that went into the book - a thief being marched through the streets of Kabul at gunpoint by a group McCurry supposes to be a local gang. The thief has his hands tied behind his back. He is wearing a sign around his neck, which McCurry says no one has yet translated, and a bloodied bandage around his head.
In the slides, you can sense McCurry circling his subject, walking alongside the group, tracking them at close range, until the right angle presents itself: the frogmarchers turned to face him, the bandaged man abjectly facing the ground. McCurry shot all of these photos on slow Kodachrome slide film, on a camera with a motor. ‘‘At some point, they executed that guy,’’ he says.
McCurry is clear-eyed about the changes that have taken place in the country he once knew so well. ‘‘It’s become much more dangerous, much more inaccessible,’’ he says.
On his most recent trip, last year, he spent three weeks in Kabul, and didn’t see a single foreigner on the street. The hotel where he stayed that time had been the site of a massacre by the Taliban two years earlier. ‘‘You’re always looking over your shoulder,’’ McCurry says. ‘‘You’re always wondering, is someone gonna bust into my hotel room?’’ That happened to him in 1992: ‘‘Somebody told somebody, and they decided to come in and help themselves to my stuff. That was frightening.’’ He’d hidden his camera equipment, and his passport and money under the rug. But two men entered with machine guns at 2am. McCurry was asleep. ‘‘They could easily have just killed me,’’ he says. Yet the sense of there being more to see and do may have been brought on less by weariness with Kabul than the positive lease of life afforded by McCurry’s daughter, who is seven months old. For years, he says, having a family was not a priority. Then he met his partner, who is Native American, when she helped him on a project in the Grand Canyon. A few years later, they reconnected and got together. Soon, he had not just one travelling companion but two.
‘‘We took our daughter to the Arctic, we took her to Burma, Portugal, Cuba - we take her everywhere. We’ve been to Thailand, we’ve been to Italy three times, Brussels, the Netherlands...’’ Now, he says, he wants to make sure he visits places that are ‘‘safe for this child’’. Given that he’s not climbing mountains or doing expeditions across the Sahara, he thinks this should be possible - and he relishes the chance ‘‘to be able to help shape her into somebody who’s going to be comfortable with different cultures, different people’’.
McCurry says no one rejoices in the prospect of getting up at four in the morning to change nappies, however old they are, but I point out that since he’s probably permanently jet-lagged, he may be just the person for the job. ‘‘That’s true,’’ he says with a chuckle.
What should be done in Afghanistan? McCurry’s expertise must give him a privileged view of a possible solution. He is philosophical about the prospect of negotiating with people who are effectively already winning. ‘‘The Taliban, they say: ‘You have the watch, we have the time. You have the technology, but we can outwait you forever - we’re home.’ I would say they’re having a fair amount of success.’’
‘‘It’s so complicated,’’ he adds. ‘‘I think going in after 9/11 was the right thing to do. But I think the Afghans have to decide what kind of society they want to live in.’’ Wait: does he mean, now that he’s planning never to return, that the American government should do the same - withdraw, and leave the Afghans to their own devices? One of the things his photographs promote, I tell him, is compassion. What happened to that?
‘‘What I’m promoting is a more intelligent approach,’’ he explains. ‘‘I don’t think we should cut and run. I think we should be a stabilising influence.’’ But, he says, between the priorities of the Pentagon and the corruption of the Afghan government, it’s hard to move forward. ‘‘Most American diplomats don’t want to be there,’’ he says, gathering emphasis. ‘‘Nobody wants to speak those languages. The Americans in Kabul are bunkered in the embassy - they’re counting the days. I’ve been in that embassy they’re isolated, they don’t give a s--- about Afghan culture. Maybe they have a driver, or a guy who holds the door - ‘Oh, hi, Abdul. ‘ But they’re clueless. The situation is impossible because there’s no will.’’
By now, McCurry’s soft-spoken manner has turned insistent, and the veteran traveller offers a glimpse of the kind of hero who might come in handy. ’’You need somebody like T E Lawrence,’’ he says, ‘‘who spoke Arabic, and had an interest in Arab culture, and wasn’t afraid to sleep out under the stars.’’ - Telegraph Group
"I think I've said everything I have to say about Afghanistan. Life is short. There's other things I want to experience. It's like being at a smorgasbord and just sitting at the shrimp bar."