Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs

The Library Essay

Colour Did the Reporting

Steve McCurry crossed into Afghanistan in 1979 dressed in local clothes, with exposed film sewn into his garments, and the pictures he carried out began four decades of work across Asia's borders and wars. His photograph of a young Afghan refugee, made in a Pakistan camp in 1984, became one of the most recognised magazine covers ever printed, and his saturated Kodachrome colour became a way of seeing that a generation of photographers absorbed; when the film was discontinued, its maker gave McCurry the last roll.

This Phaidon volume of 2011 collects the photographs the public knows best, from India's railways to monsoon floods and the faces of the displaced. Their beauty has been debated in photojournalism's ethics seminars ever since, but their reach has not; these are the images through which distant places became familiar.