Photo of the day: “The Afghan Girl”

May 7, 2009

Sharbat Gula born ca. 1972 in Afghanistan of Pashtun ethnicity.

The Afghan Girl (STEVE MCCURRY)

This is an amazing photograph for many reasons. Beyond the beauty of her eyes is what she is saying with them. To me, they reflect the intensely empty stare of war – in her case almost radioactive.

In the early 1980’s her Afghan village was bombed by the Soviets, killing both her of her parents forcing her, her siblings and her grandmother to flee to the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan. It took two weeks of walking through the mountains in the winter cold to get there. She was photographed there by photojournalist Steve McCurry and this picture was featured on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic Magazine. He did not know her name and she was referred to simply as the “Afghan Girl”. She was approximately 13 y/o.

She married Rahmat Gul sometime in the late 1980s and returned to Afghanistan in 1992. She gave birth to four daughters: Robina, Zahida, and Alia – the fourth died in infancy.

It was the first time her picture was ever taken and she was unaware of how iconic her image had become when she was eventually located in 2002 in a remote Pashtun region of Afghanistan. There she was photographed for the second time in her life (age 30) by the same Steve McCurry. A documentary based on her “Search for the Afghan Girl” was aired in March 2002 and she was featured on the cover of the April 2002 of National Geographic.

National Geographic started a charitable foundation in her honor called the Afghan Girls Fund, with the goal of educating Afghan girls and women. In 2008, it was broadened to include boys and the name changed to the Afghan’s Children’s fund. Why the need to broaden it to boys who are allowed to be schooled anyway?

Her second photograph at age 30 is the more important of the two, I think, since it physically embodies the ravages of war and reflects the depression of oppression. She looks bent and broken, filled with an untranslatable weary bitterness and hint of shame not of her making – the pain in her eyes as intense as the green in her first photo. It appears as if she barely had the physical energy to lift her head to look into the camera. And when she did she said: How could you?

Who is she speaking for? To? About?

What did she think when she saw her two photos side by side? What did she see in her eyes and face?

How much is she aware of what goes on beyond her daily life?

I don’t know what went on in the interim and haven’t seen the documentary [click the link above and you can watch it or free] or read the second NG issue. All I know is she didn’t want to bothered anymore and hoped her daughters would get the education she was not allowed to finish.

To me, both are equally beautiful and disturbing.

1984 Sharbat Gula, 13 (STEVE MCCURRY)

2002 Sharbat Gula, 30 (STEVE MCCURRY)