ThinkBlog

You know that pic taken in 1985 of a twelve-year old girl, an Afghan refugee in Pakistan, by Steve McCurry?

Yes, you do. You can’t have missed it. Lately I’ve been in stores and have seen it on National Geographic covers, gone to blogs and seen links to all the various places across the ‘net where it resides. Okay, already. My turn. This IS one of the most awesomely poignant pictures of a tragic kind of innocent fear, &c. McCurry DOES deserve his due for having taken it. But I want to know what happened to that girl. Where is she now? Did her life, or the life of her family, change for the better because of this photo? Probably not. That’s a reflection on so much more than the look of horror in her beautiful eyes.

From an NPR article:

“Her look kind of summed up the horror, because her village had been bombed and her relatives had been killed, and she’d had to make this two-week trek through the mountains to the refugee camp.” McCurry said he tried to find the girl years later, but the refugee camp had been disbanded.

Photo © Steve McCurry.

You know that pic taken in 1985 of a twelve-year old girl, an Afghan refugee in Pakistan, by Steve McCurry?

Yes, you do. You can’t have missed it. Lately I’ve been in stores and have seen it on National Geographic covers, gone to blogs and seen links to all the various places across the ‘net where it resides. Okay, already. My turn. This IS one of the most awesomely poignant pictures of a tragic kind of innocent fear, &c. McCurry DOES deserve his due for having taken it. But I want to know what happened to that girl. Where is she now? Did her life, or the life of her family, change for the better because of this photo? Probably not. That’s a reflection on so much more than the look of horror in her beautiful eyes.

From an NPR article:

“Her look kind of summed up the horror, because her village had been bombed and her relatives had been killed, and she’d had to make this two-week trek through the mountains to the refugee camp.” McCurry said he tried to find the girl years later, but the refugee camp had been disbanded.

Photo © Steve McCurry.