STEVE McCURRY
Steve McCurry (born 1950, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American photojournalist and photographer whose four decades of work across the conflict zones, street markets, and landscapes of Asia and the Middle East have produced some of the most widely recognised images in the history of documentary photography. Educated at Pennsylvania State University, he travelled to India in the late 1970s and subsequently disguised himself in local dress to cross the Pakistan border into Afghanistan in the months before the Soviet invasion, emerging with rolls of film sewn into his clothing that were among the first images of the conflict to reach the Western press. The photographs were published worldwide and won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club.
McCurry joined Magnum Photos in 1986, and his image of Sharbat Gula, an Afghan girl photographed in a refugee camp in 1984 and published on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985, became one of the most recognised magazine covers in the history of photography and has been described as the Afghan Mona Lisa. Over his career he has received an unprecedented four first-place awards from the World Press Photo contest and has published more than twenty photobooks. His major retrospective ICONS travelled to six cities across five countries.
He was appointed Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by France’s Minister of Culture in 2013 and received the Centenary Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Royal Photographic Society in 2014.