Foreword by Steve McCurry 6

Shooting Under Fire 8

India By Rail 28

Monsoon 48

The Afghan Girl 72

After the Storm 84

Gateway to India 102

In the Vale of Sorrow, Kashmir 138

Sanctuary: The Temples of Angkor 154

A Country Apart 172

September 11th 190

The Tibetans 214

Beyond the Footsteps of Buddha 232

Hazara: Strangers in the Homeland 256

Fighting HIV/AIDS 284

Chronology 302

Bibliography 310

Index 316

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9

In late May of 1979, as the rising temperatures signalled the impending arrival of summer, Steve McCurry was journeying north from Central India to the mountainous province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, situated at the western tip of the Himalayas in Pakistan. ’ He was into the second year of his travels around Southern Asia and over the previous months, he had been selling images to various small magazines, for a few hundred dollars a piece, as a means to sustain himself on his journey. When McCurry arrived in Chitral, a small town at the base of the vast Tirich Mir Mountain, he immediately sought out a cheap hotel. From this base he was able to set out to explore the surrounding area. This was to be another adventure in McCurry’s journey from, in his own words, ‘being a news photographer in Philadelphia to becoming an established magazine photographer.’

Prior to arriving in Chitral, McCurry had been reading about the developing situation in Afghanistan in a local newspaper and discovered how thousands of refugees had been fleeing the growing civil war and setting up camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. A few days into his stay, McCurry met some such refugees at his hotel and an uexpected opportunity presented itself. ‘They were from Nuristan’ he recalled, ‘and they explained how many of the villages in their area had been destroyed by the Afghan army. These guys were really scared and nervous and

worried about the future of their country. I told them I was a photographer and they insisted that I come and photograph the civil war that was raging. I had never photographed in an area of conflict before and I wasn’t sure how I would react. When they came for me the next morning, I was having second thoughts, but I wanted to honor my commitment so I went ahead. They dressed me in an old shalwar kameez and sneaked me across the border. They referred to themselves as the Mujahideen and were part of the uprising that was turning into a civil war.’

McCurry trekked with the Mujahideen for several days through one of the covert passages between Pakistan and Afghanistan that traverse the Hindu Kush Mountains. ‘There was a lot of fear just in leaving Pakistan in disguise and going into another country’, McCurry recalled. He soon discovered that he was, in his words ‘woefully unprepared’. ‘Among my belongings’, McCurry continues, ‘were a plastic cup, a Swiss Army knife, two camera bodies, four lenses, a bag of film and a few bags of airline peanuts. My naiveté was breathtaking, yet my Afghan guides protected me and treated me as their guest. That was my first experience with the legendary Afghan hospitality.’ What McCurry found when he arrived in Afghanistan was the beginning of one of the defining conflicts of the cold-war era. Ultimately, it was to become a proxy war, a conflict in which

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Father and son, Kunar, Afghanistan, 1979

Shooting Under Fire

SynopsisIn 1979, under deteriorating security conditions, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to the aid of the Government, currently struggling to quell the US-backed mujahideen rebels. At the same time, Steve McCurry would enter Afghanistan under a similar veil, cloaked in local garments and smuggled under the border with his revolutionist guides. McCurry traveled with the Mujahideen intermittently over a number of years, exposing the deeply personal strife behind a civil war backed by the world’s two major superpowers. His images would define the conflict and a world-renowned photojournalist was born.

Dates & Locations1979 Afghanistan, Pakistan1980 Afghanistan, Pakistan1982 Afghanistan

Selected PublicationsThe New York Times, 3 December 1979, p.2The New York Times, 27 December 1979, p.1The New York Times, 29 December 1979, pp.1, 6The New York Times, 30 December 1979, p.3Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 December 1979, p.7A The New York Times, 31 December 1979, p.A6, A11Expressen, 7 January 1980, p.8–9 International Herald Tribune, 9 January 1980, p.1 The Christian Science Monitor, 22 January 1980, pp.12–13Paris Match, January 1980, p.30Stern, February 1980, p.19CTIME, 28 April 1980, p.31Modern Photojournalism, May 1980, p.13–22Newsweek, Month 1982, p.21–9

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2726 Shooting Under Fire

Mujahideen fighters, Afghanistan, 1980

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5756 Monsoon

from a talk by Lt General Hussain Muhammed Ershad held at a Monsoon Rainfall Prediction workshop in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Through Veslind’s notes, McCurry discovered when the best time for heavy rain in the Nepalese mountains is, and the areas suffering from the worst erosion because of the annual downpour were to be found in the countryside around Kathmandu valley. In the midst of the chaos of the monsoon, such information was vital and it enabled McCurry to be in the right place at the right time as he spent several weeks photographing in this particular region.

McCurry also looked in the newspaper everyday to discover when the rains were pre-dicted to come. ‘I’d discover’, notes McCurry, ‘that the Monsoon had arrived in a particular region. So, I’d end up jumping on a plane and going there. Or maybe I would be in a café having lunch or dinner and it would start to rain and I’d drop everything and rush out and take pictures. You have to respond immediately to the situation because those heavy rains really don’t last for long. When it’s a really heavy downpour, these things only last for 5-10 minutes, so if it starts to rain you have to race outside and start shooting.’

For McCurry, these downpours offered both a practical challenge and a marvelous opportu-nity to capture something truly unique. In the first instance, he was faced with keeping his cameras and lenses dry; not an easy proposition when you are wading through flood waters 4 feet deep or fighting a sudden deluge. ‘I carried a large gold umbrella when I shot in the rain’, McCurry explains, ‘I had my back turned to the wind, and fifty per cent of my time was spent keeping the camera lens dry. Sometimes in the downpour, I felt that my front lens was the only dry object in a radius of fifty miles, an unnatural object in a world meant to be wet! I was always soaked, but the lens survived. I learned to hold the umbrella myself, balanced on my shoulder, almost invari-ably, an assistant would squeeze himself under the umbrella, forcing my camera out.’ Yet, in such moments, he was able to capture images

of beauty and misfortune, from such scenes as a young girl looking desperately cold and dejected as she tries to shelter herself against the down-pour (see p. xx), to a humorous image of a dog waiting for a door to open while the waters continue to rise around him (see p. xx). ‘For me,’ McCurry continues, ‘the weather has mostly been a congenial ally, creating mood and drama for photographs. But in the heart of the monsoon, I was forced to immerse myself in weather so profound that nothing else mattered – not art, not culture, not intellect. It was a lesson in humility.’

The monsoon would not sweep across the Indian subcontinent in a methodical and pre-dictable wave. Rather, one area would suffer monumental levels of rainfall, while others would be left untouched. During one period of calm before the waters broke, McCurry documented the life of the fishermen of Goa, who base their working life around the cycle of the dry and wet monsoons (the cold dry monsoon coming in the winter months, and the warm rainy season in the summer). As McCurry recalled, ‘I spent a few weeks in the little fishing village of Sirgao, near the capital city of Panaji. The seas were already getting rough with the storms raging in the Indian Ocean, but the real monsoon was nowhere in sight. For several nights I slept in a fisherman’s house, awakening at 4am to sail with them into the dark waters in their small, carved dugout canoes. I would sit on the bottom of the boat with my camera bag clutched between my knees, with two oarsmen kneeling fore and aft. We would move quickly through the bay for hour after hour, the oarsmen’s blades knifing tirelessly through the water. The seas were muddy from earlier rains that had washed silt into the sea from the moun-tains to the north, and sometimes waves broke over the gunwhales. I was afraid we would be swamped, but the fishermen would simply laugh. They had been fishing this way for generations in the fragile craft even into the early days of the monsoons. It would get much worse, they would say, and grin at me. They would fish until N

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Dust storm, Rajasthan, India, 1983

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69Monsoon

Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi, India, 1983

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SteveMcCurryUntold_Blad_2012-02-01.indd 10-11 01/02/2012 18:11

289288 Fighting HIV/AIDS

would translate to stories that were positive and life affirming. When it became clear that even with all the help of medication and health advice, many of the sufferers were going to die, travelling from his hotel to be with the families everyday became emotionally draining. The remaining photographs from McCurry’s time with Tuyen and Luong are testament to the pure grief and deep sorrow McCurry was faced with picturing. In one picture Luong is seen in the back of a car, tears rolling down her cheeks. The picture was taken on Luong’s journey back home after she had just received news that she was HIV positive. “Now I too am infected by the disease’, she said at the time. ‘I’m just 21 years old. It is possible that my son is also infected [but he subsequently tested negative]. I thought a lot about that. I was very depressed. I wanted to die. For three days after getting my results, I thought a lot about everything. But I would still get up when I had to prepare lunch or dinner for my son.” In another moment, taken after the death of his father, we see the two-year-old Toan being consoled by Luong. McCurry has captured them seemingly isolated, cut adrift from the world around them. After losing her husband, Luong told McCurry that she feared she would lose everything. Such thoughts haunted her on a daily basis. Now she was alone, and one of her greatest worries was that Tuyen’s father would take away the farm and possibly even her son. Many of McCurry’s pictures reveal Luong walking alone along an empty track cradling her son, praying at her late husband’s grave, or hugging Toan in the early eve-ning. In the final picture from this series, Luong is seen toiling the earth outside her house. The fading light is only punctuated by the golden glow from inside the house. Toan is asleep and Luong is seizing the last few rays of light to do so much needed work. In the face of everything, the only answer is to carry on. In these images McCurry had to draw on all his thirty years of experience to translate the experience of sorrow and anguish into images that would serve The Global Fund’s

aims of both informing the viewer of their work, as well encouraging governments and private bene-factors to give money to the organization. The results are works of deep sensitivity, that reveal how the efforts of local treatment centers offer a rare lifeline for sufferers in a country that often ignores the problem.

The final series of images McCurry produced for the ‘Access to Life’ project were of Nguyên Quôc Khánh. Khánh lived in a Hanoi apartment, and had contracted HIV when working in one of the illegal goldmines that pepper the central provinces of Vietnam. He began working at the mine one year after he was married. Maybe it was being away from home, the isolation and bore-dom, but like many other miners he began to use opium. Once he was hooked on opium, the locals began selling heroin instead and Khánh, inevita-bly, became a user and, shortly after, an addict. After leaving the mine, Khánh could not shake the habit and eventually went into a government-sponsored rehabilitation unit in Phu Tho Province. Unfortunately, just when he needed to be getting help, some of the inpatients had smuggled heroin into the centre and they would often end up shar-ing a needle. Khánh believed it was possibly at that moment that he contracted HIV.

Khánh’s stay at the rehab clinic took place in 2001/2002 and, aside from a bad case of diar-rhoea, he displayed no obvious symptoms that he was HIV-positive. It was not until 2007 that he became aware of having the virus. Throughout that year he had been getting gradually weaker and was spending more and more time in bed. The family was suffering financially because of Khánh’s absence from work, and his wife Tiep had to support the family, which also included two children, his 16-year-old son Thanh and 13-year-old daughter Binh. The family business was ‘a breakfast stall in the market that was her family’s main source of income’ recalls McCurry. ‘But once people learned that her husband, Khánh, had AIDS, many of them stopped buying food from her.’ Such myths and misunderstandings that

placed in the middle of a rice field. They are both crying. Luan is holding on to her daughter as she puts some more incense sticks into the grave. The grey sky, the dilapidated building (once a church) in the distance, and the wet muddy field, all contribute to a scene of profound grief and sorrow. McCurry followed the mother and daugh-ter back to their home and photographed them walking together through the field full of fresh green shoots. Although we know Luan is also HIV positive, it’s a final picture that embodies some hope for the future, and reflects positively on The Global Fund’s work.

The second person McCurry photographed was Duong Van Tuyen. Also living in the Thái Nguyên province, he was married to Luong, a young girl from the local village. The couple had a two-year-old son, Toan, and lived in a small two-roomed house. Like Luoc, they ran a small farmstead, given to them by Tuyen’s father as a wedding present. The labour was hard and Tuyen had to supplement his income with other work. Yet, beyond such difficulties, they consid-ered themselves lucky to have the life they had. However, all this changed when in June 2007, Tuyen found himself in hospital after being diagnosed as HIV positive. ‘Luong was a young woman who had just married at 19,’ McCurry notes, ‘she had a small child and expected to live a typical farmer’s life in the countryside. Out of the blue, she learned that her husband was dying from AIDS – and that she too had been infected with the virus. Even though her husband had infected her, she stood by him; ‘I don’t know when he got his disease,’ Luong said. ‘Before getting married, he seemed a good man and good tem-pered. I don’t know anything about when he got infected. If you talk about me placing blame, then I don’t. I don’t place blame on anybody, because it’s this disease; it’s heartless and it’s easy to transmit.’

Knowing free treatment was available was the one thing that gave her hope. Tuyen noted that when Luong ‘knew that I had the disease,

she said, “You scream at the heavens in despair – just go get the medications.”’ But stubbornly, in the early stages of the disease, he refused to go. Becoming, according to Luong, ‘more hot-tempered’, he argued that they were in debt and could not afford more hospital fees. Only when the disease was advanced did he wholeheart-edly enter into taking the medication. However, it was too late and he only survived for 17 days after beginning the Antiretroviral drugs, dying in December of 2007.

McCurry’s journey from discovering Tuyen was HIV positive, to him dying, reveal images of fear, pain and acceptance. Each of his images chart a stage in this journey, utilising the quali-ties of light, tone, and colour to reveal something of what McCurry himself was feeling when in the presence of people faced with the possible end of their life. In one of the earliest photographs, McCurry pictures Tuyen praying in the bedroom. We can see he has already begun to lose weight; his coat seems far too big for his small frame. Later on, maybe on the same day, Tuyen is seen looking through the mosquito net that surrounds the bed. He appears pensive, unsure of what is going to happen next. Clearly, he is struggling with the thought that he has infected his wife with HIV. ‘At first’, Tuyen noted during this time, ‘I thought, “That’s it – now I will die from this.” After that, many people encouraged me to go get medications to take. With health, I can still help my wife and son. I can still live with my wife and son and my parents. But if I die, I don’t know what my wife and child will do. How will they live? If they are infected, they won’t know how to get the medications and take them. They’ll die just like me. So I try to live.” The subsequent pictures by McCurry reveal Tuyen’s expectations of prolong-ing his life to have been unrealistic. In each frame his spirit seems to ebb away, until in one image he just looks up towards McCurry’s camera barely conscious of his presence.

When McCurry visited Vietnam, he thought that the work The Global Fund were carrying out

Spreads from Access to Life (2009) featuring McCurry’s photographs of Duong Van Tuyen

Spreads from Access to Life (2009) featuring McCurry’s photographs of Nguyên Quôc Khán

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297296 Fighting HIV/AIDS

Interior, Phu Tho province, Vietnam, 2007

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191

During August and early September of 2001, Steve McCurry was in Tibet. Visiting various mon-asteries in Lhasa, Labrang and Larung Gar, he was documenting the disciples on pilgrimages, as well as traveling into the high grassy plains to picture the nomads tending their livestock. It was a photo story close to his heart, a land of deep spiritual significance that he was constantly drawn back to. On the 8th September he trav-eled from Tibet to Hong Kong and then back to New York, arriving on a grey and overcast Monday afternoon (10th. September). One of the reasons McCurry had decided to journey back on this day was that he had a meeting at the Magnum agency with 11 of the organisation’s other mem-bers. Amongst his fellow photographers attending this meeting at 151 West 25th Street, were such luminaries as Susan Meiselas, Larry Towell, Gilles Peress, Thomas Hoepker and Alex Webb.

McCurry awoke on the morning of Tuesday 11th September in his 5th Avenue apartment on the north side of Washington Square Park. He’d gone down to his office, which is in the same building, to open up the backlog of mail that had been accumulating over the past few months while he was traveling. ‘You can actu-ally see the World Trade Center from my office’ McCurry recalls. ‘I was opening up my mail when my assistant’s mother called and said, “Look out your window”.’ It was 9:10am; just seven minutes after United Airlines Flight 175 had crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and 24 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower. The first impact, caused by a Boeing 747 fully loaded with fuel that sliced right through floors 93–99, destroyed access to most of the stairwells for anyone trapped above the impact zone. The second plane, a Boeing 767, had crashed, at an angle, between floors 77 and 85. McCurry saw the smoke billowing from the towers but did not, at that time, know anything about the planes that had hit the buildings. However, after receiving the call, he instinctively grabbed his camera and ran

up the stairs to the roof of his apartment. ‘I have an unobstructed view of all of downtown Manhattan from the top of my building, so I just ran upstairs and started shooting.’ Through McCurry’s first images, we can see his attempts to comprehend what was happening. As with many of his other projects, McCurry captures a contextualising shot of the unfolding scene. This is an approach he has used in stories as diverse as Kuwait and Monsoon, where we see an overview of the scene (usually shot from a plane) before then moving in closer. Here McCurry was acting on instinct, doing what he has done throughout his long career; yet it was also a way of coping with something McCurry had never experienced in his life. In one of these early images we can see people gathered around the Washington Square Arch looking south to the World Trade Center. They appear as small dots on the ground, ominously echoing those of the firefighters and emergency crews that would then be surrounding and entering the stricken build-ings. Throughout all of these opening images, the bright blue skies form an incongruous back-drop to the two towers as black smoke drifts eastwards across the harbour towards Brooklyn and beyond. McCurry continued to photograph these scenes for 40 minutes, and then the unimaginable happened.

At 9:59, just under an hour since the plane had struck it, the South Tower started to collapse. Half an hour later, the North Tower imploded. From the roof of his apartment, McCurry continued to photograph the appalling scenes unfolding before him. He kept photographing because he believed it was important to record what was taking place. ‘This is what I do’ McCurry notes, ‘I’m a documen-tary photographer and I thought this needs to be documented, somebody needs to capture this so we have some memory of this awful event.’ Maybe the camera – containing the horror within a frame – enabled McCurry to deal with the unspeakable devastation he was witnessing. ‘I was in a state of disbelief when the towers fell’ continues McCurry. ‘It was an indescribable, deep terrible sadness.

September 11th

SynopsisTe sedi sum fugit estrum ius et officil in re prectat videbit aut experspe voluptatur sant fugit latiis evenist ibusandist occaeribus am inctentiae restiur sum fugia quam in nihillitat eos pernam dolorrovit, et aut que nites et ea nonem fuga. Itat.Agnimus modi corestem. Et intenih itaquam qui autendi Te sedi sum fugit estrum ius et officil in re prectat videbit aut experspe voluptatur sant fugit latiis evenist ibusandist occaeri-bus am inctentiae restiur sum fugia quam in nihillitat eos.

Dates & Locations2001 New York, USA

Publications‘Remains of the Day’, New York Times Magazine, 23 September, 2001Magnum Photographers, New York September 11, New York: Powerhouse Books, 2001Agnimus modi corestem. Et intenih itaquam qui autendi Te sedi sum fugit estrum iusAgnimus modi corestem. Et intenih itaquam qui autendi Te sedi sum fugit estrum ius

Rescue workers search a mountain of wreckage after the collapse of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, New York, 11 September 2001

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242 243Beyond the Footsteps of Buddha

Bicycle and Buddha statue, Mandalay, Burma, 2008

94 95Kuwait

turned south towards Kuwait, when the driver of his jeep decided to switch columns and head over to an adjacent line of military vehicles. ‘Not a good idea’, McCurry observed. ‘We found ourselves gingerly trying to maneuver through a bumper crop of unexploded “bomblets” from allied cluster bombs. I stayed in the back seat of the jeep, fi guring if the front end blew up, I’d have an extra two feet of space. I also sat on my fl ak jacket for extra protection.’ During this moment, McCurry felt like he had fi nally caught up with the war. ‘Apache helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles were just ahead fi ring into Iraqi bunkers and vehicles’ McCurry recalls, ‘we had a good vantage point for the raging battle – too good in fact. Our jeep mounted a berm near the border and got stuck on top of it, with an entire column lined up behind us. We tried manhandling it over. Then another vehicle tried to pull us clear. But our stubborn mule of a jeep wouldn’t budge. It fi nally took a good strong shove from a truck to put us over the top.’

Once deep into Kuwait, the 42nd Field Artillery Brigade was ordered to stay put. So McCurry took it upon himself to head back to Saudi Arabia, where he would then be able to collect his jeep and drive back to Kuwait City. Hitchhiking with two army couriers, he undertook a fairly disconcerting nighttime drive through the desert, with no map or radio. As they crossed the darkened wasteland McCurry suddenly saw for himself how Hussein’s troops had ruthlessly executed their dictators instructions “to set the whole region on fi re.” Hussein’s ‘Scorched Earth’ policy had resulted in the organized and effi -cient detonation of over six hundred oil wells. Hammad Butti, an oil worker who remained in the country during the invasion, described how the Iraqi troops went about destroying the mines. ‘On Sunday, February 17, they began to fi re the wells. They put dynamite in each, put a sandbag on each charge to direct the blast downward, and detonated it with an electric charge. Every 10 or 15 minutes they fi red another well – boom! Soon

the sky was full of fi re and smoke.’ As the troops withdrew they also mined the area surrounding the wells to make the job of putting out the fi res even more treacherous. While Hussain’s orders were aimed at creating maximum destruction and diffi culty for the incoming allied troops, the envi-ronmental consequences were clear for all to see. Although it was nearly midday, McCurry observed that the ‘darkness caused by the burning oil wells was like a moonless night. The exposure on my camera was about a quarter of a second on f2.8.’ f2.8.’ fHe continues, ‘the photos I brought back show the black hellish landscape – yet they cannot convey the fi ne mist of oil particles that hung in the air, nor the deafening roar of the wildly burning wells. Nor can they show the unexploded bombs and mines that dotted the Kuwaiti landscape. I’ll never forget the chilling moment when I got out of the car to stretch my legs under a jet-black Kuwaiti oil cloud and caught a glimpse of an allied “lawn dart” mine behind the vehicle with our tire tracks running right over it!’ When McCurry arrived in the centre of the city it ‘was like a kind of end of the world scenario. It looked like a big movie set, a real sense of unreality. I just wasn’t used to seeing a modern city in such a state of destruction.’

McCurry stayed in the city’s famous International Sheraton Hotel. However, while it was once known for its luxury, when McCurry arrived the stench of rotting rubbish perme-ated the air. Inside, McCurry quickly saw that the

as he moved with the Brigade from Saudi Arabia into Iraq. ‘As the sky brightened on the fi rst morn-ing of the invasion’, he continues, ‘I stared at my own column of tanks, trucks, and other support vehicles stretching as far as I could see front and back, with identical lines on either side from hori-zon to horizon. We made progress as fast as we could. Once in a while we stopped, and soldiers dashed around carrying powder explosives. Then with a roar our big guns launched a rain of fi re ahead of our advancing columns to demoralise the enemy. During four days of advance, the unit, attached to the Army’s VII corps, fi red an ear-numbing 5,440 artillery rounds and 1,286 rockets. The invasion route took us north, deep into Iraq. Then we turned sharply southeast and headed toward Kuwait.’

McCurry spent four days with the brigade. He split his time equally between document-ing the efforts of the allied forces as they swept across the desert, and how the war was having a signifi cant impact on Kuwait’s delicate eco sys-tem. This dual approach was something McCurry maintained throughout the project. On the one hand he would photograph and talk to people directly affected by Hussain’s forces, but he would also train his camera on their surrounding envi-ronment. In many instances the two strands of the story would coincide, such as the documentation of people working to save endangered wildlife or those struggling clean up the destroyed oil fi elds.

However, it was on his third day with the army that he discovered his fi rst evidence of the impact of the intense aerial bombardment and lightning attacks from the north that had pre-ceded them. Travelling along he found ‘corpses of Iraqi soldiers laying by burning hulks of armoured vehicles and abandoned positions.’ These fi gures were often calcifi ed in a deathly grimace by the falling oil. Pictures of these gruesome scenes by such photographers as Sebastiao Salgado, Abbas (who McCurry encountered and photographed on his sojourns into the desert) and Kenneth Jarecke appeared in magazines and newspapers around

the world, causing shock and outrage. McCurry’s image of a burned Iraqi solider was one such work and was featured in the published article in National Geographic (‘After the Storm’, National Geographic, vol. 180, no. 2, August 1991). It was an image that was part of his general wish to capture the after effects of war, both in terms of its human impact and the wider environment.

While still embedded in VII corp’s, McCurry

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44 45India by Rail

Train Station Platform, Old Delhi, India, 1983

40 41India by Rail

takes his pet goat to the market to sell. Yet, it is curious that in all McCurry’s pictures from inside the train, that there are few images shot through the window of the scenes outside, in fact it is usu-ally the reverse.

As already observed, each time the train stopped, McCurry would step off the train for a few minutes. He would photograph people get-ting on and off, but more commonly he would turn his camera back towards the train and use the carriage windows as a natural framing device. In

one such image we see a Bengali woman and her son leaning out of the window. The relationship between the deep crimson colour of the car-riage and the woman’s shawl, combined with her intense gaze and the red Bindi on her forehead, makes for a beautifully organic scene. McCurry uses the same technique to picture families using the window to escape the crowded conditions of the carriage, of passengers buying goods from traders in stations, or capturing farmers keeping a close eye on the milk cans that are hung off the side. In one image that emerged from these nar-row time frames, McCurry presents us with four portraits (one could almost say ‘character stud-ies’), within a single image, of travelers looking out of their respective windows. Who knows what each of these individuals are feeling? Where they are going? Who will meet them at the end of their journey? As the bikes hung on the side of the train indicate, maybe for some the journey will continue that little bit further. Finally, McCurry used this technique to point-up the economic divides that exist between the 1st class travelers and those unable to pay for any form of train travel. Jumping off the train at a station in Bangladesh, through the window he pictures a white man in the car-riage, while above him on the roof is a rather windswept man. In fact, McCurry even ventured up onto the roof to take several portraits of these itinerant travelers. In one, we see several farmers taking their hay to market. Positioned precariously atop the carriage, the danger of falling is ever present. As McCurry himself recalled, “Once I was photographing and didn’t see some low electri-cal lines. One hit me in the back of the head and knocked me down, but fortunately not off the car.”

The physical division between the pas-sengers witnessed in the previous images is simply an extension of the way the train is divided between the different classes. Unlike trains in the West, many of vestibules between 1st and 2nd class carriages are locked. The outcome is that any food or beverages that have to be transported to customers in those sections have to be passed

it wonderful to photograph, because you are able to photograph these people’s lives as they do their own thing. Also, people are working. Around the stations you find a lot of small businessmen. For example, people are maybe just trying to make a chair, or maybe someone repairs shoes, or they are a barber. In fact, many of the barbers who operate in stations just have a chair and a dish with a little bit of water in it, very simple.’ We see one such individual at work in McCurry’s image of a barber on the platform of Peshawar Cantonment station. The customer has had the thick lather of foam applied to his face, and sits in a relaxed pose. Maybe it is something to do with the fact that the man is displaying his gun prominently on his hip that makes the barber appear tense, being careful not to slip. It was instances such as this, images in which there is no distinction between public and private, where people just live their lives in full view, which so attracted McCurry to India and Pakistan. ‘You have this extreme range of class and caste and rich and poor’, McCurry has said, ‘and people tend to live their lives out on the street, whereas in the U.S. people tend to do everything indoors. There’s just a fascina-tion. Sometimes it’s shocking, but it’s always

interesting. You never get bored. In India there is always this rich activity going on right in front of you, it’s amazing.’

The insidious divisions engendered by the social and economic inequalities that char-acterise much of Indian society are reflected in the topography of the country’s trains. On the whole, McCurry was mostly drawn to the 2nd and 3rd class carriages. One of the reasons for this was his belief that the life of such people was markedly different from those he would have discovered in his homeland. Alternatively, for McCurry, the trappings of wealth common to those higher echelons of Indian society often result in a visual homogeneity that is comparable to similar economic groups across the world, and as such holds very little interest. (One could also argue that those more affluent passengers had a stronger say as to whether it was OK to photograph them or not). In his journey from Simla to Agra, McCurry would take a seat in the overcrowded carriage that is commonly known as the “Peoples Express”. Such a title simply acknowledged the fact that 90% of the income for the railway comes from the poorest passen-gers. Inside the train, most customers are experts at carving out the smallest space to make their journey comfortable. McCurry’s picture of the interior of the Assam Mail train reveals people travelling squashed together on seats and sit-ting in the luggage racks above. In many of the images McCurry manages to capture his fellow passengers unawares, frequently lost in the rever-ies affected by the repetitive clank and clatter of train against track. Initally, to obtain such images is difficult. However, ‘if you’re in a train compart-ment six hours’ McCurry notes, ‘eventually people will become bored. A lot of it is just having the patience to wait it out, because there’s an initial period where people are curious and they crowd around. Part of it is just being patient and wait-ing until people decide to look somewhere else or get bored with you.’ In one such image we see a young boy, comforted by his grandfather, as he

Bombay, India, 1993

Bicycles on the side of a train, West Bengal, India, 1983

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Howrah Station, Calcutta, India, 1983

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Horse and tire tracks, Kuwait, 1991

16 17Shooting Under Fire

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A selection of spreads from the book featuring the following stories, from top, left to right: ‘Shooting Under Fire’ (1979); ‘India by Rail’ (1983); ‘India by Rail’ (1983); ‘The Afghan Girl’ (1984); ‘After the Storm’ (1991); ‘After the Storm’ (1991); ‘Beyond the Footsteps of Buddha’ (1978–2008); ‘September 11th’ (2001)

SteveMcCurryUntold_Blad_2012-02-01.indd 16 01/02/2012 18:12