Steve McCurry и история афганской девочки, сфотографированной в 1984

[Holly_Golightly]

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.

By Cathy Newman
Photograph by Steve McCurry

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.

The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. "I didn't think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day," he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan's refugees.

The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.

In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film's EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn't her.

No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.

It took three days for her to arrive. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.

Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.

Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. "She's had a hard life," said McCurry. "So many here share her story." Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.

Now, consider this photograph of a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all, they disturb. We cannot turn away.

"There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war," a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographic story that appeared with Sharbat's photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread. [...]

"In the mid-1990s, during a lull in the fighting, Sharbat Gula went home to her village in the foothills of mountains veiled by snow. To live in this earthen-colored village at the end of a thread of path means to scratch out an existence, nothing more. There are terraces planted with corn, wheat, and rice, some walnut trees, a stream that spills down the mountain (except in times of drought), but no school, clinic, roads, or running water.

Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Robina is 13. Zahida is three. Alia, the baby, is one. A fourth daughter died in infancy. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.

http://images.google.com.by/imgres?imgurl=http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/afghan-girl/images/afghan-girl.jpg&imgrefurl=http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangirl/&h=435&w=615&sz=207&hl=ru&start=2&um=1&tbnid=TLLgZ66srAuvcM:&tbnh=96&tbnw=136&prev=/images%3Fq%3DAfghanistan%2Bgirl%2Bnow%2Band%2BSteve%2BMcCurry%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dru%26sa%3DN

Comments

[Вжжжик]

У нее такие глазищи... не по себе от взгляда становится.
Кто она?

[Holly_Golightly]

штраффбат
на 1 фото - обычная афганская девочка, сфотографированная МакКарри в 80ых годах для журнала "National Geografic". Фото было затем размещено на обложке этого журнала и прославило автора на весь мир. Стало абсолютно знаковым.

подросшую девочку нашли и сфотографировали - фото 2.

[Вжжжик]

В детстве она была краше, однозначно)))

[vampirenok gosha]

эффектно!

[Гость]

Долгое время судьба героини снимка оставалась неизвестной. Сам фотограф возвращался в Афганистан около двадцати раз, и пытался найти , то безуспешно. Но вот в январе 2002 года - через семнадцать лет после первой публикации, администрация «National Geographic» организовала экспедицию для поиска «девушки с зелеными глазами». Они показывали фото графию местным жителям в районе до сих пор действующего лагеря беженцев. Кто-то узнавал девушку на снимке, но надежда в сердце фотографа сменялась разочарованием. В конце концов, удача им улыбнулась – один из местных жителей узнал девушку и обещал привести. Это заняло три дня – женщина жила в горах Тора-Бора, служивших укрытием для отрядов террористов. МакКарри не надеялся на удачу, но когда молодая женщина вошла в комнату, ему хватило одного взгляда чтобы понять: это она.

Молодую женщину звали Шарбат Гула (в переводе с афганского – «Цветочный нектар»). В момент второй встречи с МакКарри ей было около 30 лет. В самом начале войны ее родители погибли под советскими бомбами, несколько недель она в составе небольшой группы беженцев пробиралась в Пакистан – через покрытые снегом горы, без теплой одежды, голодная, прячась в пещерах от налетов авиации. В 1984 году Шарбат оказалась в лагере Назир-Багх, где ее и встретил МакКарри. Женщина хорошо помнит тот день: тогда ее сфотографировали первый раз в жизни. Вскоре она вышла замуж, родила четырех дочерей. Была ли она когда-либо счастлива? Это кажется весьма сомнительным, уж очень тяжелой была ее жизнь, как и всех афганцев.