The Unguarded Moment
The legendary name of Steve McCurry is the first thing that pops into mind when it comes to photojournalism and travel photography at its best. Encompassing the “decisive moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the tender humanism of Werner Bischoff and the agonizing social compromise of Eugene Smith, McCurry’s photography sheds bright light on a world reigned by absurdity and incongruence, celebrating dignity, endurance, and above all humanity’s extraordinary commonality despite the existent cultural, geographical and religious borders. From the mountains of Afghanistan and the monsoons of India to Cambodia, Philippines and Burma, McCurry’s prolonged journeys and stays at some of the most remote and conflictive zones of this planet have culminated into seminal images that have marked “a before and an after” in our inception of photography and the world.
For three decades, the work of Steve McCurry has been incessantly featured in National Geographic and other prominent magazines worldwide. In all these years, the world has changed. Photography has changed. More concept-driven, it has become ill critical of its proper rhetoric properties. Affect dominates intuition. Still, the way McCurry’s photography speaks to the hearts of millions of people has not been diminished in the least. In recent years, monographs such as “Portraits” (1999) “South Southeast” (2000), “In the Shadow of the Mountains” (2007) and others, all published by Phaidon, have become bestsellers with McCurry one of the Phaidon’s most prolific and well-represented authors. Now a new release entitled “The Unguarded Moment” is summed up as a companion volume to this appealing editorial offer, and especially to “South Southeast”. Of the same size and format with this latter title, the book contains an astonishing range of both recent as much as older work obtained from McCurry’s travelling across Africa, Europe and particularly Southeast Asia.
The notion of the “unguarded moment” has been regularly reappearing in McCurry’s statements over the last years. Comparing with Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, which seems to make reference to the very instant of image capturing (the subject being unmediated by the lens and the photographer somehow deciding what is to be recorded and “made” into history), the “unguarded moment” alludes more to an energy emanating from the sitter, a so-to-speak sudden revelation of an unaffected core humanness before the camera and despite it. Paraphrasing Fox Talbot’s expression, the camera becomes the pencil of the “inner” nature, and the photographic act an orchestration of situations, which sort of effortlessly seem to happen upon it.
Fishing, herding, praying, sleeping… The vernacular “rhythms” of everyday life provide the stage for an enactment. Common people in their common realities, common needs and routines —the final word belongs to them, and their houses, landscapes, rivers, mountains and lakes become the photographer’s studio. As Steve McCurry recounts, “I have always hoped that I could bring about pictures of my subjects in a natural way. I have always hoped that I could take a glimpse of their humanity and capture their essence without any deliberate attempt to reconstruct a fact or get a pose and a gesture out of them. What I ask from these people is to be themselves. Most of them have wonderful life-stories to narrate, sufficient to make the encounter fascinating”.
It is precisely in these chance encounters between the photographer and his subjects that a metaphysical-like fusion of the signified, the signifier and the punctum takes place. All converge to one by means of a mystic renunciation of the very principle of “being there” that has traditionally constituted the photographic momentum. And still, these pictures are not suggestive of an absence but rather of a sort of “elsewhereness”, of a transposition to that neutral blank moment when the yin and the yang converge and the “instant” —this seemingly insignificant suspension of history— melds into an expanding humanness of a sublime beauty and warmth. “It is the particular moment that counts”, stresses McCurry. “You can achieve amazing things and a wonderful quality by the way you relate to people. When you are before a situation with people talking, moving, gesturing, it is a question of the moment to reveal something interesting and profound of the human condition”. And he goes on to further add: “The amount of time does not necessarily correspond to the quality of the portrait. Trying to know somebody really well is not always the solution”. Neither are the words. “I do not rely much on them. Often, I do not even speak the language of my subjects. There is an interpreter and the encounters are very brief. When I photographed the “Afghan girl” in 1984, I only disposed of two or three minutes”.
Still one would wonder: Today that lens culture has penetrated even the remotest places of this planet, people who believe that the camera steals the soul are becoming less and less. Where is then the clear unmediated gaze to be found among subjects who pose before the camera with the awareness of an actor who is ready to look at you and be looked at? In a certain way, Steve McCurry’s camera unveils remote cultures and people as much as it underlines the potential eclipse of the sacred and the exotic in the twilight of westernization.
Certain pictures in “The Unguarded Moment” leave some clear hints of these changes. “Virgin” sitters confronting the lens appear alongside candid pictures taken from a clear distance or next to images of subjects seemingly absorbed, “hypnotised” by an activity, as for example in the case of the “Buddhist monks playing video games” or the “Geisha in the subway”. In these pictures, there is no direct gaze, but rather a sensation of a hurry, of a so-to-speak old world melting under a fleeting moment, as if the subjects were not aware that they were being photographed or did not care less about it. “I guess the world is changing and you have to record it”, admits McCurry. “I don’t think it makes any difference though! I don’t see any difference between photographing now and thirty years ago! The only differences today are that people want you to send them a picture and that you are shooting with a digital camera. There will always be new people and situations. Insofar as there are new songs to be written, new poems to be told, likewise there will always be a new photograph to be taken!”
Steve McCurry admits, of course, that high expectations may often break down to pieces when a situation becomes materialized. Every person is a world and every moment is uniquely different. Some situations are inevitably more truthful and interesting than others, and likewise some subjects are more manageable than others. As the children for instance, who constitute frequent protagonists in his pictures… “Children tend to be more accessible and easy to work with. They are fascinating! They never say no because they love to be playful”. With adults the situations are more confrontational and complex, but even so, McCurry has discovered the keys to his close-ups: “It is all about instincts, intuition and a bit of the universal language of humour. And trust, of course… Yes, trust!” he remarks with confidence. “It is all about making the person feeling somehow relaxed, not conscious of oneself and non-embarrassed. It is about creating a comfortable, friendly, non-threatening ambience”.
“The Unguarded Moment” constitutes one of Steve McCurry’s more intimate and personal statements. The monograph epitomizes neatly the overall philosophy and restless curiosity of a man who has had one hundred lives; of a man who has recollected the seeds of an amazing trajectory but also paid the price of following a very tough path. His eyes have born testimony to innumerable conflicts. And yet, despite the unbearably irrational cruelty of their surrounding historical circumstances, what these pictures transmit in retrospective is a gaze that has preserved a soul resistant to profound despair and nihilism. The sublime play of light and shadows, and the quasi-mystical energy underlying them are statements of an uncontested faith to humanness and a deeply rooted optimism.
What has helped Steve McCurry sustain his spirit? The passion for wandering and observing, the contact with the Buddhist stoicism, photography…? “No. It is people first and foremost”, he responds without hesitating. “People who get caught up in conflicts; good people who just happen to be in the wrong place; people one cannot help but admire and respect for their capacity to survive, their dignity, kindness and generosity despite losing everything”.
To them —not to the ones who do the fighting, but to civilians and refugees, to women and men and children who, though carrying the burdens of death, loss and refuge, preserve their smile— Steve McCurry has dedicated his inner creative urge. Over all these years, his iconic images have conferred visibility to their human stories, arising international attention and sensibility. They have also contributed in sustaining the non-profit organisation “Imagineasia” that works in collaboration with local community leaders in central Afghanistan to provide fundamental educational and health resources. “Imagineasia consists of sending very simple things such as textbooks, notebooks and pencils to universities and schools”, clarifies McCurry. “We wanted to do something very manageable, where one can actually see the benefits”. When he goes on to describe illustratively the eagerness of these children to learn and to play with the pencils and books they are given, one clearly sees how photography can contribute to a better world.
Steve McCurry is a master of colour, form and ambience. His influence has been more than paramount to the way the rhetoric of travel photography and photojournalism has been constructed over the last three decades, and yet nobody photographs like him! From the Soviet war in Afghanistan to the current Taliban conflict, from Yugoslavia and the Gulf War to mundane everyday scenes, McCurry’s images seem to preserve a life-openness imbued by the wisdom of the oriental mysticism.
Just a short look through the biography of this American-born photographer who gave up his job in a Philadelphia newspaper to make himself “a stranger in a strange land” leaves sufficient clues. For McCurry’s decision to leave back the Western civilization did not just imply wandering across Asia as a nomad with a rucksack and a camera, but, instead, a constant process of confronting and assimilating original raw cultures of a fascinating diversity, despite their geographical proximity. Such is the case of Afghanistan and Tibet. With their striking frictions, these two countries have invigorated him profoundly —Afghanistan as a place of turmoil, and Tibet as an inward, more spiritual, non-violence driven world. However, over his thirty-year career he has personally attested various times how differences in language and culture end up all being superficial when one gets to know people and their yearnings closer. “Deep down human beings are very similar”, McCurry stresses. “Ironically, one of the things that tend to generate division is religion! While spirituality is supposed to be something that should bring people together in a mutual understanding, it does completely the opposite! It often forces people to think: your way is wrong and therefore I will force you to mine”. And he concludes with the most important lesson he has gained in life: “The fundamental problem of this world is the lack of respect. It is astonishing how humans completely disregard humans and other living creatures, how poisonous civilizations can be to nature and animals! It is irrelevant if the roots of the contemporary chaos are in the Middle East or the Tigris river area. It all comes down to the fact that people do not respect each other”.
In their wisdom —a wisdom culminated by long hours of witnessing and observing the world with the camera as a “passport”— Steve McCurry’s “unguarded moments” become exceptionally universal. Though many of these visions are set against landscapes ravaged by disaster and death, they bespeak a profound appreciation of life and its wonders. By appealing to an essential humanness, the supposed “Other” becomes us. The individual gazes of these children, men and women —vulnerable and attentive, careless and warm at the same time— transcend language and culture. They reveal the remarkable range of beauty bridging the unknown and the familiar. Frontiers break and one cannot help but get carried away by the grand river of life which flows on endlessly. “We long to maintain the here-and-now but it is continually disappearing, changing, evolving”, stresses McCurry, his words reminding us of Heraclitus.
Yes, indeed, everything is in a state of flux. But, Steven McCurry has managed to suspend the moment with his camera. What remains is stillness and photography —photography articulating with humility the possibility of a new life of unguarded dignity and hope; a new life of a human kind replete of light and shadows, waters and skies.
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
All pictures: Steve McCurry
Imagine Asia Foundation
Publication:
Steve McCurry, “The Unguarded Moment”.
Published by Phaidon Press, May 2009
Hardback, 156 pp
75 colour illustrations
Price: 59,95 €
ISBN 978 0 71484664 4
The legendary name of Steve McCurry is the first thing that pops into mind when it comes to photojournalism and travel photography at its best. Encompassing the “decisive moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the tender humanism of Werner Bischoff and the agonizing social compromise of Eugene Smith, McCurry’s photography sheds bright light on a world reigned by absurdity and incongruence, celebrating dignity, endurance, and above all humanity’s extraordinary commonality despite the existent cultural, geographical and religious borders. From the mountains of Afghanistan and the monsoons of India to Cambodia, Philippines and Burma, McCurry’s prolonged journeys and stays at some of the most remote and conflictive zones of this planet have culminated into seminal images that have marked “a before and an after” in our inception of photography and the world.
For three decades, the work of Steve McCurry has been incessantly featured in National Geographic and other prominent magazines worldwide. In all these years, the world has changed. Photography has changed. More concept-driven, it has become ill critical of its proper rhetoric properties. Affect dominates intuition. Still, the way McCurry’s photography speaks to the hearts of millions of people has not been diminished in the least. In recent years, monographs such as “Portraits” (1999) “South Southeast” (2000), “In the Shadow of the Mountains” (2007) and others, all published by Phaidon, have become bestsellers with McCurry one of the Phaidon’s most prolific and well-represented authors. Now a new release entitled “The Unguarded Moment” is summed up as a companion volume to this appealing editorial offer, and especially to “South Southeast”. Of the same size and format with this latter title, the book contains an astonishing range of both recent as much as older work obtained from McCurry’s travelling across Africa, Europe and particularly Southeast Asia.
The notion of the “unguarded moment” has been regularly reappearing in McCurry’s statements over the last years. Comparing with Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, which seems to make reference to the very instant of image capturing (the subject being unmediated by the lens and the photographer somehow deciding what is to be recorded and “made” into history), the “unguarded moment” alludes more to an energy emanating from the sitter, a so-to-speak sudden revelation of an unaffected core humanness before the camera and despite it. Paraphrasing Fox Talbot’s expression, the camera becomes the pencil of the “inner” nature, and the photographic act an orchestration of situations, which sort of effortlessly seem to happen upon it.
Fishing, herding, praying, sleeping… The vernacular “rhythms” of everyday life provide the stage for an enactment. Common people in their common realities, common needs and routines —the final word belongs to them, and their houses, landscapes, rivers, mountains and lakes become the photographer’s studio. As Steve McCurry recounts, “I have always hoped that I could bring about pictures of my subjects in a natural way. I have always hoped that I could take a glimpse of their humanity and capture their essence without any deliberate attempt to reconstruct a fact or get a pose and a gesture out of them. What I ask from these people is to be themselves. Most of them have wonderful life-stories to narrate, sufficient to make the encounter fascinating”.
It is precisely in these chance encounters between the photographer and his subjects that a metaphysical-like fusion of the signified, the signifier and the punctum takes place. All converge to one by means of a mystic renunciation of the very principle of “being there” that has traditionally constituted the photographic momentum. And still, these pictures are not suggestive of an absence but rather of a sort of “elsewhereness”, of a transposition to that neutral blank moment when the yin and the yang converge and the “instant” —this seemingly insignificant suspension of history— melds into an expanding humanness of a sublime beauty and warmth. “It is the particular moment that counts”, stresses McCurry. “You can achieve amazing things and a wonderful quality by the way you relate to people. When you are before a situation with people talking, moving, gesturing, it is a question of the moment to reveal something interesting and profound of the human condition”. And he goes on to further add: “The amount of time does not necessarily correspond to the quality of the portrait. Trying to know somebody really well is not always the solution”. Neither are the words. “I do not rely much on them. Often, I do not even speak the language of my subjects. There is an interpreter and the encounters are very brief. When I photographed the “Afghan girl” in 1984, I only disposed of two or three minutes”.
Still one would wonder: Today that lens culture has penetrated even the remotest places of this planet, people who believe that the camera steals the soul are becoming less and less. Where is then the clear unmediated gaze to be found among subjects who pose before the camera with the awareness of an actor who is ready to look at you and be looked at? In a certain way, Steve McCurry’s camera unveils remote cultures and people as much as it underlines the potential eclipse of the sacred and the exotic in the twilight of westernization.
Certain pictures in “The Unguarded Moment” leave some clear hints of these changes. “Virgin” sitters confronting the lens appear alongside candid pictures taken from a clear distance or next to images of subjects seemingly absorbed, “hypnotised” by an activity, as for example in the case of the “Buddhist monks playing video games” or the “Geisha in the subway”. In these pictures, there is no direct gaze, but rather a sensation of a hurry, of a so-to-speak old world melting under a fleeting moment, as if the subjects were not aware that they were being photographed or did not care less about it. “I guess the world is changing and you have to record it”, admits McCurry. “I don’t think it makes any difference though! I don’t see any difference between photographing now and thirty years ago! The only differences today are that people want you to send them a picture and that you are shooting with a digital camera. There will always be new people and situations. Insofar as there are new songs to be written, new poems to be told, likewise there will always be a new photograph to be taken!”
Steve McCurry admits, of course, that high expectations may often break down to pieces when a situation becomes materialized. Every person is a world and every moment is uniquely different. Some situations are inevitably more truthful and interesting than others, and likewise some subjects are more manageable than others. As the children for instance, who constitute frequent protagonists in his pictures… “Children tend to be more accessible and easy to work with. They are fascinating! They never say no because they love to be playful”. With adults the situations are more confrontational and complex, but even so, McCurry has discovered the keys to his close-ups: “It is all about instincts, intuition and a bit of the universal language of humour. And trust, of course… Yes, trust!” he remarks with confidence. “It is all about making the person feeling somehow relaxed, not conscious of oneself and non-embarrassed. It is about creating a comfortable, friendly, non-threatening ambience”.
“The Unguarded Moment” constitutes one of Steve McCurry’s more intimate and personal statements. The monograph epitomizes neatly the overall philosophy and restless curiosity of a man who has had one hundred lives; of a man who has recollected the seeds of an amazing trajectory but also paid the price of following a very tough path. His eyes have born testimony to innumerable conflicts. And yet, despite the unbearably irrational cruelty of their surrounding historical circumstances, what these pictures transmit in retrospective is a gaze that has preserved a soul resistant to profound despair and nihilism. The sublime play of light and shadows, and the quasi-mystical energy underlying them are statements of an uncontested faith to humanness and a deeply rooted optimism.
What has helped Steve McCurry sustain his spirit? The passion for wandering and observing, the contact with the Buddhist stoicism, photography…? “No. It is people first and foremost”, he responds without hesitating. “People who get caught up in conflicts; good people who just happen to be in the wrong place; people one cannot help but admire and respect for their capacity to survive, their dignity, kindness and generosity despite losing everything”.
To them —not to the ones who do the fighting, but to civilians and refugees, to women and men and children who, though carrying the burdens of death, loss and refuge, preserve their smile— Steve McCurry has dedicated his inner creative urge. Over all these years, his iconic images have conferred visibility to their human stories, arising international attention and sensibility. They have also contributed in sustaining the non-profit organisation “Imagineasia” that works in collaboration with local community leaders in central Afghanistan to provide fundamental educational and health resources. “Imagineasia consists of sending very simple things such as textbooks, notebooks and pencils to universities and schools”, clarifies McCurry. “We wanted to do something very manageable, where one can actually see the benefits”. When he goes on to describe illustratively the eagerness of these children to learn and to play with the pencils and books they are given, one clearly sees how photography can contribute to a better world.
Steve McCurry is a master of colour, form and ambience. His influence has been more than paramount to the way the rhetoric of travel photography and photojournalism has been constructed over the last three decades, and yet nobody photographs like him! From the Soviet war in Afghanistan to the current Taliban conflict, from Yugoslavia and the Gulf War to mundane everyday scenes, McCurry’s images seem to preserve a life-openness imbued by the wisdom of the oriental mysticism.
Just a short look through the biography of this American-born photographer who gave up his job in a Philadelphia newspaper to make himself “a stranger in a strange land” leaves sufficient clues. For McCurry’s decision to leave back the Western civilization did not just imply wandering across Asia as a nomad with a rucksack and a camera, but, instead, a constant process of confronting and assimilating original raw cultures of a fascinating diversity, despite their geographical proximity. Such is the case of Afghanistan and Tibet. With their striking frictions, these two countries have invigorated him profoundly —Afghanistan as a place of turmoil, and Tibet as an inward, more spiritual, non-violence driven world. However, over his thirty-year career he has personally attested various times how differences in language and culture end up all being superficial when one gets to know people and their yearnings closer. “Deep down human beings are very similar”, McCurry stresses. “Ironically, one of the things that tend to generate division is religion! While spirituality is supposed to be something that should bring people together in a mutual understanding, it does completely the opposite! It often forces people to think: your way is wrong and therefore I will force you to mine”. And he concludes with the most important lesson he has gained in life: “The fundamental problem of this world is the lack of respect. It is astonishing how humans completely disregard humans and other living creatures, how poisonous civilizations can be to nature and animals! It is irrelevant if the roots of the contemporary chaos are in the Middle East or the Tigris river area. It all comes down to the fact that people do not respect each other”.
In their wisdom —a wisdom culminated by long hours of witnessing and observing the world with the camera as a “passport”— Steve McCurry’s “unguarded moments” become exceptionally universal. Though many of these visions are set against landscapes ravaged by disaster and death, they bespeak a profound appreciation of life and its wonders. By appealing to an essential humanness, the supposed “Other” becomes us. The individual gazes of these children, men and women —vulnerable and attentive, careless and warm at the same time— transcend language and culture. They reveal the remarkable range of beauty bridging the unknown and the familiar. Frontiers break and one cannot help but get carried away by the grand river of life which flows on endlessly. “We long to maintain the here-and-now but it is continually disappearing, changing, evolving”, stresses McCurry, his words reminding us of Heraclitus.
Yes, indeed, everything is in a state of flux. But, Steven McCurry has managed to suspend the moment with his camera. What remains is stillness and photography —photography articulating with humility the possibility of a new life of unguarded dignity and hope; a new life of a human kind replete of light and shadows, waters and skies.
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
All pictures: Steve McCurry
Imagine Asia Foundation
Publication:
Steve McCurry, “The Unguarded Moment”.
Published by Phaidon Press, May 2009
Hardback, 156 pp
75 colour illustrations
Price: 59,95 €
ISBN 978 0 71484664 4
.
