We know when it is facing a photograph of Steve McCurry, especially if the scenario is India, which claims to have learned to see and know how to wait. It also makes us wait as it completes the previous interview. You are sitting in a chair overlooking the street, waving in greeting. Minutes later, shook his left hand – the right is incapacitated by an accident as a kid. He is a man who takes on the look. We ask the American photographer to make a guided tour of twenty photographs that brings to Lisbon (Barbado Gallery), in his first one in Portugal.
Before, orders a coffee, you know the brand, justified by being a strong drinker. Accompany with a pastel de nata thumbnail. Follows the tour . He points out the women back, bright red robes sheltered by a tree trunk in a dust storm in Rajasthan. Date: 1983. In this series there is another image he often said to be his chosen. But is not this exhibition. I know her books. We ask you to tell the story of another photograph, opposite wall. A toddler and his mother, faces glued to the glass of a car. Place and date: Bombay, 1992. “I was in a taxi to the hotel the way, we stopped at a traffic light. It was August monsoon season. I there in the comfort of an air conditioner and they out there. Only months later I realized that there was a photograph. “
We went back to the entrance of the room, window to the street Ferreira Borges, in between, a wall on the right, a quote from Alberto Moravia A idea of India (Portuguese edition of Tinta-da-China).
Steve McCurry is 66 years old and as I said several times not matter if the first lines in his obituary is on Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl photographed in 1984 and the following year was to move the world on the cover of National Geographic . Sums up the life of a Magnum photographer, awarded Gold Medal Robert Capa and several World Press Photo, a single image?
McCurry has just arrived from Afghanistan, spent three weeks there in job. Thirty years ago, it was Afghanistan that led to the pages of New York Times , Time , the National Geographic when watching the Soviet invasion and disguised photo films in the sheaths of a tribal to pass on the border with Pakistan. It was then a young freelancer 28 years. He was the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war in former Yugoslavia – not review the reporter’s description of war but lived embedded. was presumed dead, beaten, robbed, arrested. Also brought him popularity. The discourse of this relatively short man, wearing denim shirt under a tots square coat and pulls out a cap when you go out to the street, it is made of loose sentences, some surprisingly no shot. Two days after the interview, over a hundred people died in a fire in a state of Kerala temple in southwest India.
The first time I went to India, was 27 years old, had been photographer Daily Post , Philadelphia, and cast as freelancer . What were looking for, a kind of “education in humanity”?
Yes, it’s true. I was curious about this part of the planet – had traveled through Africa, Central America, Europe. I would stay for about six weeks. Two years. And I began to find places and people, stories which want to return in the near future.
returned more than 80 times. That country had, or have, to reveal?
Well, my work in India, the photographs can be seen in this exhibition are a short poem about the country. Do not tell the whole story, is not a job done to be published in a journal, say that are my impressions above all, a poetic look at places and times that affected me. It is a country with a great cultural depth.
But in this India that rarely shows we see signs of modernity, almost as if he intended to bring to our days an Indian millenary that is, but also stagnant.
part of India that makes it unique, and that’s what interests me, especially speaks of tradition, an ancient quality of a place. In fact, I’m rather interested in investment in space programs [refers to the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, the acronym in English] or technological advancement. I worry more an ancient way of life.
You must be a long time in a place to experience and their culture?
everything is valid. Both a photographer and a writer may feel validated in the first few prints, as staying a year and still do not understand what surrounds them. still say it’s common that can shoot better as if you have knowledge of what photographed. But actually empathy on the street, looks that cross, can give an excellent picture.
read the latest Photographer article and essayist Teju Cole, the magazine NYT?
Yes.
[briefly, writes Cole the latest set of the photographer's work, India , gathered in a book by Phaidon, is essential McCurry. But it's boring. Popular but boring, to evoke clichés forgetting that ensures the uniqueness of any country is a mixture of its past with its present.]
Want to comment?
[points to the picture to the gallery entrance, showing yellow roof cabs intersect with passers-by and street vendors] you see this? This is Bombay, 90 years.
For you, that’s modern Mumbai?
also photographed the space program in Bangalore, which made equipment for satellites; photographed televisions plants; fashion. Some were published in the Times in National Geographic . But they are not visually interesting. Not interest me laptops based on your lap or mobile phones. In fact, most of my work in India comes from long before this advance was made between the 80s and now. I give you another example: I work on Nomadic to be a way of life endangered because of urban growth, the expansion of the road network, the population explosion. This is what fascinates me.
His family gave him the nickname of Perpetual Motion (always moving). Today we can say that they were right. What came to him first, the idea of travel or photography?
trip. When I was 19 already was in Europe, I worked in restaurants in Stockholm and Amsterdam, I went to Turkey, Israel. I returned, I continued studies, hired me as a photographer, that to annoy me and want to travel again.
Only picture is taken when traveling? May be happening in our neighborhood stories.
Absolutely. always it depends on what interests us and how we want to live life. Photographing the family, the neighborhood, the city, the streets, the underground landscape. Or Tibet and Syria. Or do so only selfies . It always has to do with the same very basic issues: how I want to live life? What I read? What music want to hear? What foods I want to eat?
You said you would not have your schedule service news. However, it is as if he had spent his life embedded in front of several wars. It is fearless?
Being scared is good. Last week I returned from Afghanistan, I was there on business three weeks. That country is a danger: there are suicide attacks, kidnappings, everything. We are always alert. We pay attention to the commands that arrive in the brain and it is inevitable to ask ourselves: is wise to be here, in this place where you explode bombs
But if you’re working on has time to do this question?
No doubt! Why the hell did I put myself in this situation I will be killed because of a photograph ?! Numerous times.
It is a war reporter?
not see myself there. But I had the experience of seeing children, women, civilians lost homes, families, all they had, and that is where the highest values of life are revealed and we appreciate being alive. And that’s also what we perceive as a photograph and a written report can help inform the world that the world do anything with this information.
What balance can make between photography documentary and artistic photography?
I think that even in the lives of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz happened that a photograph became dominant, universal, published and republished, iconic. You can even lose the initial purpose, to tell a certain story that was being made to a magazine.
Well, that’s talking about himself. Refers to the Afghan girl photo, Sharbat Gula, who in 1985 made the cover of National Geographic . Has a theory about the reasons that this photograph had global repercussions we know?
had those hypnotic eyes and think on his face mingled various emotions, from a great dignity, one daring to feel a survivor knowing that he was an orphan, refugee and living in miserable conditions in a tent. But proud in their survival. When we see art, or photography, often ascribe meanings to say more about us than about what we saw. But knowing a bit the Afghan people know how resilient can be in the midst of adversity. In fact, we can ask what’s different in that picture ?! Authenticity.
returned to meet 17 years later.
Yes. We found that he had a brother, who had married, who had three children and lived in a village in Afghanistan, which the husband worked in a bakery in Peshawar. What happened is that we were able to help with money, were benefactors.
Can a photograph that reaches this magnitude also be a force vest? Blur creativity because somehow you are always trying to get back to that point?
I never felt. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do it.
Shooting became a more democratic practice. Photographer Don McCullin himself says the picture was kidnapped by the digital and the world of art.
It’s evolution. The reality is like that: we see people photographing what they are lunch, friends, themselves. It is true that we all have cameras, or use the phone. But this phone can also write a poem, an essay, a play, a song. I think fantastic documentarmos our lives and in twenty years we see the memory of what we were. It is a treasure!
was in Washington Square, in your office, just arrived a month in a monastery in Tibet and saw the Twin Towers sink after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Two opposing experiences in a very fulfilled life. What you have left to do
Travel, work, publishing books – I have two in the pipeline, one on reading, better, situations of people to read; another on Afghanistan.
Who would choose to shoot to you?
I never thought about it (laughs).
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