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!

We Look As They Hide

When planning a course, you select readings for a multitude of reasons and sometimes it is not always for a reading's primary contribution to a subject. Such was the case with assigning "The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic" by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins as the very first reading in my visual anthropology course.

They identify and define seven distinct gazes at play in a photograph: 1) the photographer's gaze; 2) the magazine's gaze; 3) the reader's gaze; 4) the non-Western subject's gaze; 5) the direct Western gaze; 6) the refracted gaze; and 7) the academic spectator. Their delineation of each of these gazes provides us with a shared vocabulary and an excellent framework for discussion and evaluation of images -- especially useful for students who have not studied photography or other forms of representation. But that's not why I assigned this article.

What Lutz and Collins do is make us aware of ourselves as viewers of images. They challenge our passivity as viewers.

Theirs is one of those articles that's useful for getting you to slow down and to reconsider a common practice -- in their case, looking at photographs in a popular magazine. (Well, it's a little more complicated than "looking at photographs in a popular magazine" because National Geographic is not an ordinary popular magazine with its depictions of non-Western people and marginalized Western people.) They write, "The photograph and the non-western person share two fundamental attributes in the culturally tutored experience of most Americans: they are objects at which we look" (364). It's striking just how obvious this is in the some of the magazine's cover images cited in the article.

(top (left to right): November 1979, October 1985, August 1987, October 1987; 

bottom: November 1987, July 1988, February 1991, December 1991)

We look as they hide. And we keep looking because we want to discover what is hidden, what is behind the covered faced, the partially closed eyes, the magazine's cover. Lutz and Collins make me aware of my prying eyes. I can no longer simply look at the magazine's cover. I see myself looking.

I wonder about the implications of the assertion that both photographs and non-Western people are "objects at which we look." How can one use photography or film without transforming subjects (non-Western and Western alike) into objects? Do we avoid this subject-to-object transformation in the process of making the images or in the act of viewing images? Or, must we avoid this transformation both in the making and in the viewing of images?

If there's an easy answer, I certainly do not have it. But what seems vitally important to me after reading Lutz and Collins is the cultivation of active viewing.


Lutz, Catherine, and Jane Collins. 1994. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes:  The Example of National Geographic.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994. Edited by Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge.  Pp. 363-384.