Steve McCury/Magnum
Of all the different types of subject matter that photographers capture, most of us would probably agree that a compelling photo of a person intrigues us the most. Take Steve McCurry’s photo of the young Afghan girl that he shot in 1984, Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression era portrait of the Migrant Mother, or Oren Jack Turner’s portrait of Albert Einstein. Photographs like these have carried such strong visual impact over the course of decades that they have become some of the most powerful and recognizable images of our time. I’d wager to say that as much as people love the beautiful landscape images of Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell, it’s the McCurry and Lange images that we’ll remember most through the course of our lives.
Image of people speak so strongly to us for one main reason. They’re images of ourselves, or rather, us as we could have been if we had lived in the same places and under the same circumstances as the people in these pictures, at the time they were photographed. Since we’re essentially made up of the same ingredients, it’s the geographic and cultural variations that define the differences between someone who lives in Trenton and someone who lives in Kabul. If by mere chance, we had been born in a different corner of the world, it might very well have been one of us in that photo that Steve took.
