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Covering Afghanistan

Debra Denker and photographer Steve McCurry were covering the war in Afghanistan in the 80's as Afghan Mujahideen ("holy warriors") fought the USSR's Soviet army. After sneaking into Afghanistan to witness the ongoing war, they also visited the sprawling refugee camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. In this conservative Muslim environment Steve found it extremely difficult to talk to women who are not relatives, let alone get permission to photograph them. However, he was very determined to get a picture to have a visual representation of the Afghan refugee crisis from a female point of view.

"I was kind of walking through the refugee camp one morning and I happened across a tent. Which was being used as an elementary school and there were about 15 to 20 students in a Pakistani structure.

So i went and asked the teacher if I could, umm you know photograph some of the students, if I could stay there for a while and she agreed and I noticed this one student, one young Afghan girl about 12 who had this very kind of haunted look in her eye and I asked the teacher about her and she told me her story, that she had to walk for about 2 weeks through the mountains of Afghanistan because her village had been ahh helicoptered, you know attacked by helicopter gunships and that umm that many of her family members had been killed and so they had this perilous trip through the mountains to get to this refugee camp and she was real traumatized and kind of freaked out as you can imagine. A 12 year old first she is in a village and then suddenly in another country...

So I think this particular portrait kind of summed up for me the trauma and the plight and the whole situation of suddenly you know having to flee your home and ending up in a refugee camp, you know hundreds of miles away."
   

National Geographic's picture editor didn't want to use the picture as it was too disturbing but finally relented and put the Afghan girl on the cover. The cover was and is a huge success. Steve recalls that "Right away, we got thousands of letters from people wanting to help her, send her money, adopt her, marry her,". All these years later he still gets emails everyday wanting more information on the girl with the eyes.


http://www.famouspictures.org/

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How They Found National Geographic's "Afghan Girl"

David Braun
National Geographic News
March 7, 2003

She was one of the world's most famous faces, yet no one knew who she was. Her image appeared on the front of magazines and books, posters, lapel pins, and even rugs, but she didn't know it. Now, after searching for 17 years, National Geographic has once again found the Afghan girl with the haunting green eyes.

The mysterious Afghan girl whose direct gaze has intrigued the West for so long is Sharbat Gula. She lives in a remote region of Afghanistan with her husband and three daughters.

Sharbat was located nearly two decades after her picture appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985. She had no idea her face had become an icon, said Steve McCurry, the photographer who made the famous portrait for National Geographic in 1984, and who tried to find her again during many subsequent trips he made to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

McCurry's photo of the girl was selected as the cover of National Geographic 100 Best Pictures.


excerpts from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/

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Sharbat Gula in 1984 and in 2002

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Because Sharbat Gula lives a traditional Muslim life behind the veil, she was not allowed to meet men outside her family. But the Geographic team was given permission to send a female associate producer to meet Sharbat and photograph her face.

Matson said that when he compared the photograph of the woman with that of the girl, he was certain it was the same person. "The irises of the eyes, the moles and scar on the face—all indicated this was the person we were looking for," he said.

Still, to make sure Sharbat Gula was the girl who had been photographed 17 years earlier, the EXPLORER team obtained verification through iris-scanning technology and face-recognition techniques used by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

After Sharbat's family granted permission for her to meet with the man who photographed her 17 years ago, McCurry knew immediately, even after so many years, that he had found her again. "Her eyes are as haunting now as they were then," he said.


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/

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Sharbat Tells Her Story

When Sharbat agreed to have her picture taken for the second time in her life, she came out from the secrecy of her veil to tell her story. She wanted the people around the world who knew her face to know that she survived the refugee camp in Pakistan.

She married and had four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. She lives in obscurity, according to the customs and traditions of her culture and religion.

A member of the Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan, Sharbat said she fared relatively well under Taliban rule, which, she feels, provided a measure of stability after the chaos and terror of the Soviet war.


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/

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hey, nabalik ang usa.  puwede diay.  i'll try some more with my photobucket.

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