National Geographic's "Afghan Girl"

In a response to my earlier post We Look As They Hide,  Corax asked me to say something about the famous June 1985 National Geographic cover of an "Afghan girl." 

National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry took the photo in 1984 in a refugee camp in Pakistan. The young woman's portrait was used as the face of the cover article "Along Afghanistan's War-Torn Frontier." In the April 2002 article titled "A Life Revealed" by Cathy Newman, McCurry recalls shooting the photograph and notes he did not know at the time the photograph would be anything special. Newman describes the photograph this way, "The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart […]. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war."

Lutz and Collins would categorize the young woman's penetrating stare as the non-Western subject's gaze; this type in which the photographed subject confronts the camera make up, according to Lutz and Collins, 25% of the photos depicting non-Western subjects. The difficulty of course is how to understand what this particular confrontation signifies: hostility, vulnerability, shared humanity?

I wish I had some wise, insightful thing to tell you Corax, but I don't about this image alone. What I find fascinating, however, is the reuse of this particular image. 

In January 2002 McCurry returned to Pakistan with National Geographic Television and Film's Explorer in search of the woman whom he photographed in 1984. Neither McCurry nor anyone at National Geographic knew her name because women did not give their names to strangers, and so this truly was a search. To find her, McCurry and others showed Pakistanis and Afghans the cover photo, and eventually she was located. National Geographic discovered her name is Sharbat Gula. 

If you read the article on-line, this is the main image on the article's first page: 

But here's the cover for the June 2002 issue:

So what's going on here? The U.S. war in Afghanistan. The West's attempt to end Taliban subjugation of women.

How are we to read the magazine's cover? This face that we (readers of National Geographic) knew so well is not available to us -- found, yet hidden. We can only see her through the older photograph, before the rise of the Taliban and, importantly, before the 9-11 attacks on the U.S. It is very hard for me to see this cover and not see paired victims (women and the US) and a heroic, liberating force (the US).

It's beautiful and arresting, and oh so troubling.

Thanks for asking Corax!