Isn’t it iconic?
Remember that haunting photo of the young Afghan woman with the piercing green eyes that first appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985? The photograph was arresting, no doubt, in terms of color saturation, lighting, and composition. In fact, it had a painterly quality about it—reminiscent of an oil painting.
But the most compelling thing about that image was the woman’s eyes. Light green eyes rimmed in blue, at once startled, fearful, yet bold. Her name—Sharbat Gula—was, for decades, largely unknown, but the image itself was unforgettable.
She earned nothing—no talent fee, no royalties—for sitting for the photographer, Steve McCurry. He, on the other hand, reaped the financial and reputational rewards from the image being endlessly replicated in the media over the past 40 years.
The Western gaze
Seeing the actual photo at ICONS—the recent retrospective of the photographer in Palau Martorell in Barcelona—alongside a similar photo of another Afghan girl with pale skin and blue eyes, her head covered in a veil, I had to wonder whether these photos touched a nerve among Western viewers because of how almost white these young girls looked.
Would a darker-skinned girl with deep brown eyes, however haunted, have had the same emotional impact with an international audience?
The orientalism that informed McCurry’s photographs was discomfiting, even as there was no question he had an incredible eye for color, light, composition, and a sense of the importance of—as Henri Cartier-Bresson put it—capturing “the decisive moment.”
There were children of war swinging from the protruding gun of an abandoned tank; a young boy in South America, tears and snot running down his face, aiming a pistol at his own head; two boys running across a baobab-fringed landscape, the back of a man in a boat laden with flowers rowing across a mossy lake in Kashmir.
Inasmuch as he attempts to document people (as well as animals), places and events as they are—with a fair amount of staging despite claims of spontaneity—there is, nevertheless, a romanticized view of the other in situations of war, catastrophe, and poverty.
The Western gaze is undeniable: McCurry is, after all, American.
Exoticized orientalism
“There is a moment, when standing before certain photographs,” the exhibition notes accompanying ICONS read, “in which time seems to stand still. The gaze of the viewer meets that of the person who has been seen, and something essential passes between them—something that needs neither words nor explanation.”
While this is true in the sense that an image, especially a portrait, embodies the connection between photographer and subject, it doesn’t necessarily follow that “a glimpse into the soul,” as McCurry himself put it, is faithfully conveyed.
It is still mediated through the eyes of the photographer, and obviously further mediated through the final crop that is offered to the viewer. Don’t get me wrong: There are sublime and poetic and powerful images all throughout, but I couldn’t escape the sense of his subjects being exoticized simply because of their otherness.
Orientalism, it seems, remains an aesthetic currency.
