let lemons be angry

Steve McCurry has contributed extensively to National Geographic, his most recognisable work being the Afghan Girl (below). We went to the asian civilizations museum to pay homage to his craft, and it made me remember how i once wanted to be a photojournalist. I would hide in the second storey of the MGS library with all the National Geographic books and imagine myself travelling, travelling. Today I don't know what became of that dream. It got lost sometime when everyone began acquiring SLRs and making emo photoshoots of themselves. Sometime then I decided I wouldn't be tied to a camera.


But a photograph like this makes me regret being childishly anti-mainstream. This was my favourite photograph in the exhibition. Somehow, by trick of coincidence or craft, McCurry is able to capture entire seas of monochrome with one focused spot of color. Blue streets with blue doors and blue clothes, and sudden red scarves. The only way is to "wait", as he put in his writeup, wait for the moment when the composition comes together by itself, wait "and the soul will rise."

He sees himself not so much as a photographer, but as a traveller, an insatiable explorer, who merely shares what he has had the chance to see. But not all of us see the same things, though we may travel much. I think the difference is in his piece of advice for aspiring travellers/photographers: "Acquire humility."

In the lobby was a Canon-sponsored competition for just about anyone who wanted to be like McCurry and capture the "Unguarded Moment". There were good shots and bad shots, some unfocused, and some taken out of family albums. But the photographs that made me saddest were the well-taken shots of tribal people. They were exotic, they seemed to boast a travelling eye, and perhaps ten years ago they would have caused no small stir in any photojournalling community. Yet today's jaded generation looks at them and sighs, "Typical." We have seen so much that it is harder to move us. What is one richly-adorned neck? What is one wrinkled tribesman? We have never come close to even touching the culture of another, and yet in our seen-it-all city we dismiss all this as visuals we think we already know.

Somehow McCurry manages to capture what we have already seen in ways we have not. It is not just about photographing a costume, or a man of another ethnicity. It is about revealing something about the costume in relation to the day the child wore it, it is about the weather and smell of someplace strange; it is not merely framing, but storytelling. It is an approach that will tell us something surprising even if it was a photograph of our own neighborhood.