Amid Photoshop controversy, Michener Museum opens McCurry exhibit

In a photo, six Pashtun men sip tea in Kunduz province, blocks from where al-Qaeda devised the Sept. 11 attacks. The man most in focus has a scraggly beard tinged with gray. He looks strikingly similar to Osama bin Laden - or at least that's what Steve McCurry thought when he snapped the shot in 2002.

In the background sits a picture of downtown Manhattan, with the twin towers looming above the skyline.

"I don't know that they were even aware that that was New York and that was the World Trade Center," McCurry said. "It was just a color picture of a city to contrast with this small, little village where they were."

The Darby-born McCurry has made a career of taking intimate, complex photos of such scenes. He won acclaim for his 1985 National Geographic cover, "Afghan Girl," one of the best-known images in the world.

Now, the James A. Michener Art Museum is mounting "Unguarded, Untold, Iconic: Afghanistan through the Lens of Steve McCurry." The collection opens Saturday with free admission for the day.

It will open in the midst of controversy. In May, reports surfaced that McCurry had staged or doctored some photos, including "Afghan Girl." The Michener Museum had planned the exhibit before the scandal hit, but organizers updated programming so visitors can tackle questions about the implications of Photoshop in a digital age.

"We look to photographs to tell us about the world around us," said cocurator Kelsey Halliday Johnson, "and so I very much sympathize with the emotions. But it's been a little bit of a witch-hunt." She stressed the photographer's progression, a tale she says the exhibit will tell, placing work from his first excursions next to 20 new shots from 2016.

"We're returning to his roots," Halliday Johnson said. "He started in this photojournalistic role and has evolved into this artist and storyteller."

McCurry had been in India for a year when he traveled to the mountains of Pakistan in 1979. He stayed in a hotel that cost maybe $2 a night, where, next door, he met several Afghan refugees. They told him of a war in their homeland and offered to smuggle him in illegally so he could see. Disguised in Afghan garb, he sneaked across the border. The first place he visited was a village destroyed by bombs. After a few days, he made his way to where the fighting was.

"It was my first time in a war zone, so it was all kind of frightening," he said. "I was never really a war photographer. I was always more on the peripheral, what was happening on the edges. The refugees, and people being displaced, and people being uprooted."

McCurry left after three weeks, but he returned two months later for another stint. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he had one of the largest archives covering the area. His images were published in the New York Times, Time, and Paris Match. The rest is history.

McCurry visits Afghanistan often and has watched as it has changed over the years. Today there is "a presence of the Americans, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, the Saudis," he said. "Everyone's trying to influence. With cellphones and the internet and television and all that, it's really become part of the world community." But if you walk off the beaten path, there are "these little pockets where time has stood still," McCurry said.

He has also said that James A. Michener's 1963 novel Caravans helped prompt his interest in Afghanistan. Passages from Caravans will accompany McCurry's photographs in the exhibit, functioning as a second caption.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, McCurry has had to confront rising tensions between his own nation and the one he's capturing on film. But his work is more about communion than division. Just take "Afghan Girl," of young Sharbat Gula, and the later photo of her from 2002. Hamdullah Mohib, Afghan ambassador to the United States, says those two photos together symbolize "what this imposed war has done to Afghanistan."

After the original image was published, McCurry received letters asking how to help Gula. She became the face of Afghanistan. "I think, in the end, all humans are the same," Mohib said. "And we can start to connect with people and with cultures that are far away from us when we . . . find commonalities between ourselves. I think these pictures that Steve McCurry took transcended those barriers and made connections" between the country and people "who otherwise probably would not have had that kind of connection."

"We all respond to the same things often," McCurry said. "And if there's an incredible human face, then it fascinates me. Chances are it'll fascinate other people, too."

avillarreal@philly.com

@allyevillarreal

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Unguarded, Untold, Iconic: Afghanistan through the Lens of Steve McCurry

July 16-Oct. 23 at the James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown.

Information:

215-340-9800, www.michenerartmuseum.org. EndText