George Eastman House.George Eastman House, Rochester, just discovered York, April 19 - August 31 2003 Face of Asia is an exhibition of 35mm color photographs through Magnum and National Geographic photojournalist Steve McCurry Taken throughout the last twenty-five years, McCurry's images have garnered numerous critical accolades in addition to finding widespread public position in the pages of Time, Newsweek, and greatest in quantity prominently, National Geographic. Dispersed from head to foot the main gallery of the George Eastman House, the 81 large prints--roughly half of them portraits--are arrangeed together by the geographical location of their origin: Afghanistan, India, Cambodia, and Tibet. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The centerpiece of the exhibition is McCurry's and National Geographic's principally famous image--the green-eyed Afghan Girl portrait (1985) The first of the sum of two units main rooms of the gallery is dedicated solely to the iconic image of the then-anonymous Sharbat Gula, and the haunting quality of her by-now familiar stare is undeniably enhanced by way of the scale and chromatic richness of the large-format print. An adjacent collage of near of the image's many reproductions--on postcards, fundraising placards, calendars, and advertisements--speaks les to the image's universal power than it does, paradoxically, to its function as an void signifier. Afghan Girl has become the Migrant Mother of her generation, symbolic of the plight of all the world's 16 million refugee even now the context of her labor is more esoteric to McCurry's audience than Migrant Mother was to Dorothea Lange's. invested by its numerous facsimiles, Afghan Girl is a testament to the way in which careless, propagandistic reproduction can dilute the emotional authenticity of any image. McCurry's other prints likewise portray individuals and shows from countries that have, through the whole extent of the last 25 years, experienced tremendous social, political, and natural upheaval. Strangely, these circumstances appear largely incidental to McCurry From his photographs of the lush, peaceful house of gods of Angkor Wat to those of men in Rajasthan, India, swathed in ceremonial garb, McCurry captures the brightly saturated colors and exotic makes of traditional life without revealing abundant of his subjects' daily existence. Eugene W Smith one time wrote that, "to portray a city is beyond ending; to begin of that kind an effect is in itself a grave conceit. For however the portrayal may achieve its have measure of truth, it will be no more than a rumour of the city--no more meaningful, and no more permanent." McCurry's photographs not past nor future a rumour of Asia that steady the most sedentary American has likely caught a whiff of--the exotic becomes a vehicle for formally accomplished compositions that radiate manful bright colors, but a flat of intimacy and obligation to the grind of daily life is jeopardized. by dint of displaying ephemera like passports and camera lense along with numerous biographical anecdotes. Face of Asia creates a portrait of McCurry as the quintessential rugg American individualist: a macho, Indiana Jones-style photojournalist who battles plane crashes and near-drownings in the world's mostly dangerous regions in order to capture the finished image. Ultimately, those images teach us something about color and composition, nevertheless relatively little about life in those places that we all ne desperately, to know about--more pressingly now than eternally before. COPYRIGHT 2003 Visual Studies Workshop |
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