Steve McCurry (www.stevemccurry.com) is a master image-maker renowned for capturing the human consequences of war and civil conflict in color-soaked portraits and photojournalistic scenes. His award-winning portraiture showing war's impact on the human face has appeared in most major magazines worldwide. McCurry has published many books, including In the Shadows of Mountains, Looking East, Steve McCurry, The Path to Buddha: A Tibetan Pilgrimage, Sanctuary, South Southeast, Portraits, Monsoon, and The Imperial Way. Between assignments, he conducts international workshops and prepares large prints for his exhibitions around the world.McCurry's most recognized photo is that of "Afghan Girl", a previously unidentified Afghan refugee. The image itself was named as "the most recognized photograph" in the history of the National Geographic magazine and her face became famous as the cover photograph on the June 1985 issue. The photo has also been widely used on Amnesty International brochures, posters, and calendars. The identity of the "Afghan Girl" remained unknown for over 15 years until McCurry and a National Geographic team located the woman, Sharbat Gula, in 2002.
Steve McCurry:
Worldwide Workshops
Every year for the past 10 years, I’ve conducted photography workshops all over the world—Burma, India, Tibet, Morocco, Tahiti. I organize them personally. We have a two-week workshop coming up in March 2009 in India. I’ll be taking my H3DII and Nikon D3s. The people who come to our workshops have a passion for photography and want to take their work to another level. We show them how I would approach a place or subject, so they can learn to develop their own approach. We go over the principles of how you work in this or that light, and work with shapes and forms, etc. It’s about discovering what is unique about a place and how to get a sense of the place in pictures. Everybody has a different idea of what an interesting picture looks like, but I think we know an interesting picture when we see it.
Some people don't really understand the level of commitment that's required at the workshops. We go out and shoot in the morning, have lunch, shoot after lunch, and keep shooting until it gets dark. Once they’re actually there on the ground working with the people, things start to make sense and the message starts to emerge.
Each day, we put together a slide show and look at everybody’s work together on our laptops, talk about what’s good, how it could have been done better, and so on. When we look at the pictures, hopefully, we’ll be amazed and moved. Emotion. That’s what it’s about.
Some people don't really understand the level of commitment that's required at the workshops. We go out and shoot in the morning, have lunch, shoot after lunch, and keep shooting until it gets dark. Once they’re actually there on the ground working with the people, things start to make sense and the message starts to emerge.
Each day, we put together a slide show and look at everybody’s work together on our laptops, talk about what’s good, how it could have been done better, and so on. When we look at the pictures, hopefully, we’ll be amazed and moved. Emotion. That’s what it’s about.
