Green Shawl Peshawar

Steve McCurry is an American photographer who gained international acclaim for his arresting portrait of a young refugee known simply as Afghan Girl.

Originally published on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, the photograph shows a young Pashtun orphan, later identified as Sharbat Gula, who was living in a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, during the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. The image is emblematic of McCurry’s work, which has brought him to war zones across the globe. Rather than focusing on the violence of the battlefield, McCurry seeks to capture the human face of conflict, distilling what is universal and recognizable in each portrait.

McCurry was born in Philadelphia and attended Penn State University, graduating cum laude with a degree in theater arts in 1974. After several years working at a newspaper in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, he left to work as a freelancer in India, where he honed his skill for capturing unguarded moments in daily life. Just prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979, he crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghan rebel–controlled territory, wearing native garb to disguise himself, with rolls of film sewn into his clothing. The photographs he took there were among the first in the world to document the conflict, and his work was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for “photographic reporting from abroad.”

Over the course of his career, McCurry has documented daily life alongside conflicts in Cambodia, the Philippines, the former Yugoslavia, Beirut, Iraq, Afghanistan and Tibet. Though his photos depict serious and sometimes frightening situations, his ability to connect with subjects and capture something of their personalities allows his images to transcend the documentarian distance of wartime journalism. The results are real portraits that happen to be set in tough situations. Welder in a Ship Breaking Yard, Mumbai, India (1994), for instance, reveals only the subject’s eyes, but they’re so intently fixed on McCurry’s lens that they seem to express volumes. Monk Running on Wall (2004) shows a young monk defying gravity as he skitters along an exterior wall of the Shaolin Monastery in Henan, China, over the heads of his friends. Like a Baroque painting, McCurry’s picture captures a moment of dynamic action that reveals something instantly recognizable in a subject from another part of the world.

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The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.