Devotion has always defined Steve McCurry. In 1978, when he was just 27, he left his suburban Pennsylvania home for India, with nothing but a rucksack and a camera. He was going to document the overlooked populations of Asia.
A year later, wearing the traditional perahan tunban of the mujahideen, he crossed into rebel-controlled Afghanistan. It was 1979 and the Soviet invasion was imminent. McCurry grew out his beard and sewed rolls of film into his clothes. “As soon as I crossed the border,” he said at the time, “I encountered about 40 houses and a few schools that were just bombed out.” The photos he took, the first to illuminate the brutality of the invasion, kick-started his career and won the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award.
In 1984, McCurry was staying at a refugee camp in Peshawar when he captured what CNN called “the world’s most famous photograph”—Afghan Girl, a portrait of Sharbat Gula, her striking green eyes glaring from beneath a terra-cotta-colored turban. McCurry has not only documented countless wars—in Iraq, Cambodia, the Philippines, Lebanon, and the Gulf—he even survived a plane crash into Yugoslavia’s freezing Lake Bled. In 2001, from the roof of his office building, he captured the Twin Towers as they teetered and then collapsed into clouds of ash and rubble on September 11.
In his new book, Devotion: Steve McCurry, the photographer has chosen more than 100 images, including 75 unpublished ones, that reflect the book’s title. From images of people enjoying morning prayers in the desert, their turbans facing the sunlight, to two men bringing flowers to a cemetery oppressively dominated by identical white crosses, to scenes from a prison in Florida, each photograph speaks of humanity. “If you wait,” McCurry once said, “people will forget your camera, and the soul will drift up into view.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at air mail