Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry (born April 23, 1950) is an American photographer, freelancer, and photojournalist. His photo Afghan Girl, of a girl with piercing green eyes, has appeared on the cover of National Geographic several times. McCurry has photographed many assignments for National Geographic and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1986.

McCurry is the recipient of numerous awards, including Magazine Photographer of the Year, awarded by the National Press Photographers Association; the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal; and two first-place prizes in the World Press Photo contest (1985 and 1992).

McCurry was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended Penn State University. He originally planned to study cinematography and filmmaking, but instead gained a degree in theater arts and graduated in 1974. He became interested in photography when he started taking pictures for the Penn State newspaper The Daily Collegian.

After a year working in India, McCurry traveled to northern Pakistan where he met two Afghans who told him about the war across the border in Afghanistan. Disguised in Afghani garb, he crossed the Pakistan border into rebel-controlled areas of Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion. "As soon as I crossed the border, I came across about 40 houses and a few schools that were just bombed out," he says. He left with rolls of film sewn into his turban and stuffed in his socks and underwear. These images were subsequently published by The New York Times, Time and Paris Match and won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad.

McCurry covered more armed conflicts like the Iran–Iraq War, Lebanon Civil War, the Cambodian Civil War, the Islamic insurgency in the Philippines, the Gulf War and the Afghan Civil War. McCurry came close to losing his life twice. He was almost drowned in India, and he survived an airplane crash in Yugoslavia. McCurry has had his work featured in magazines worldwide and he is a frequent contributor to National Geographic.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, McCurry received a call saying the World Trade Center was on fire. He went up to the roof of his building and started taking photographs, unaware that a plane had hit the towers. He photographed the two towers and their eventual collapse. After the fall of the towers, he ran to Ground Zero with his assistant. He left later that night and went back early on September 12. He had no press credentials and evaded security to access the site. He was eventually caught and escorted off Ground Zero; he did not go back again.

McCurry switched from shooting color slide film to digital capture in 2005 for the convenience of editing in the field and transmitting images to photo editors. He said that he had no nostalgia about working in film in an interview with The Guardian. "Perhaps old habits are hard to break, but my experience is that the majority of my colleagues, regardless of age, have switched over ... The quality has never been better. You can work in extremely low light situations, for example."

McCurry shoots in both film and digital, but has said that he prefers shooting with transparency film. Kodak gifted him the last roll of Kodachrome film to ever be produced by the company. McCurry shot the roll, which was processed in July 2010 by Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas. Most of these photos were published on the Internet by Vanity Fair. McCurry states, "I shot it for 30 years and I have several hundred thousand pictures on Kodachrome in my archive. I'm trying to shoot 36 pictures that act as some kind of wrap up – to mark the passing of Kodachrome. It was a wonderful film."