Our local second hand bookstore (yes, it still exists and business seems to be booming) has a cart of old National Geographics outside the store. Whenever I walked by, I would usually stop and take a look at the photos. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw this issue. This is probably the most famous National Geographic cover ever. Steve McCurry's photo of the Afghan girl really defined what portrait photography is for me. I still remembered the sense of awe I felt when I first saw it years ago. How the photo seemed to be jumping out of the cover and I was not looking at a photo of a girl but was staring at an eternal mystery.
It was also an amazing story. McCurry took the photo of the girl in a refugee camp but didn't know her name. After the photo became a big hit and readers everywhere were asking National Geographic who the girl was. The girl and her family had left the refugee camp and were nowhere to be found. It took National Geographic 17 years to track down and found her again. By the time they found her, she looked quite different. You could hardly tell the girl she used to be. She looked just like one of those middle aged woman with a touch life, even a bit too serious. (NG had to match the iris patterns and eye freckles with McCurry's photo to be sure.*)
Holding the magazine in hand, I was surprised the photo didn't have the same impact on me any more. I noticed the film McCurry used was too grainy (compared to the clean images generated by a modern digital camera), the resolution not high enough. In short, I noticed all the technical details yet had totally failed to see a great picture. Why? Was I over exposed to the image so I couldn't see it with fresh eyes? (Or is there always a technical aspect with photography which makes it different from other art forms, such as painting.) Like the girl photographed, when I saw the photo again I also saw innocence lost, my innocence as a photo reader.
