Steve McCurry and the National Geographic

If less can ever be more, perhaps going back may help you in moving forward. If the urge to go back is there, how can you rest till you do? I do not mean going back home. After all, plenty of people have made that pilgrimage, only to report you can’t go home again. But I write of something much bigger and much more important to one’s fulfillment as an inquiring mind, involving geography.

This story perhaps the whole world knew about at the time. But someone missed it, perhaps you did. A National Geographic photographer, Steve McCurry, felt compelled to go back to Pakistan to look for the young woman he caught on camera in 1984, just one child among several he photographed in the school tent at a refugee camp. What captivated him, when he saw his finished pictures, were her enormous sea-green eyes, in a land where eyes are so brown, they look black. A portrait that “sears the heart,” her picture ran on the cover of the June 1985 National Geographic.

McCurry went back and found the girl, now a married woman and the mother of three children, but with the same “haunted and haunting” eyes. These eyes haunted McCurry for seventeen years.

Many people might think this silly, a waste of time and energy, but I understand the man and applaud his efforts. In addition to intriguing people like me, it made a good story for National Geographic and for television. One might say, if you could use a little excitement in your life, go back somewhere to finish a dream or a story, but not back home. Home would be too subjective a destination; you need to be objective about this. Go back alone and finish the dream.