Steve McCurry went to Penn State where he got a degree in theater arts. During his time at Penn State he took pictures of the Penn State newspaper which got him very interested in photography. This was just the beginning of his career path of famous photography. Steve McCurry is an American photographer, most known for his famous photograph of “Afghan Girl”, on the cover of National Geographic. He has received a variety of awards over the years including magazine Photographer of the Year, the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal, and two first place prizes in the World Press Photo contest.
McCurry has always put his creative mind and work in front of anything when launching his career. According to National Geographic, McCurry disguised himself and snuck across the Pakistan border into areas of Afghanistan before the Soviet Invasion. He witnessed schools and houses that had been bombed and destroyed that he had photographed. McCurry went on to photograph many more areas across the globe that had been destroyed. He risked his life numerous times to show people what the toll of war took on people’s lives.
McCurry’s reputation as a photographer was extremely questioned in 2016 when he was accused of photoshopping and manipulating his images. The photoshop scandal first began after one of his images that he presented at a show in Italy was changed. According to Peta Pixel’s website, Paolo Viglione he was the first one to catch this botched image and call Steve McCurry out for it. The first image that was found botched was a photograph from Cuba where the street sign is distorted. After this find, people went on to look for more of Steve’s images that were also edited. This is when Steve McCurry decided to change his work title to a “visual storyteller”. At first McCurry directed the photoshopping to other people that were responsible for printing and shipping his images. Although, eventually McCurry took responsibility for this editing of pictures when he was forced to.
According to Time’s Lightbox website, McCurry also added after admitting to the photoshopping, "Reflecting on the situation … even though I felt that I could do what I wanted to my own pictures in an aesthetic and compositional sense, I now understand how confusing it must be for people who think I’m still a photojournalist." I think McCurry’s career path as visual story telling instead of photojournalism suits his photographs more. I enjoy and appreciate it and I think he is a great artist. The gift of photoshopping that McCurry has, makes his images more clean cut. I think his photograph’s after the photoshop made them better and more appealing. Without McCurry’s editing of these pictures, a new look on photography would not have been available to us today. Photoshopping is a very important and crucial step in people’s creative images. McCurry changed the photography industry for the best and without his photoshopping talents, it would have never opened a door to a more creative and ingenious way of capturingstories.
Works cited
“Botched Steve McCurry Print Leads to Photoshop Scandal.” PetaPixel, 7 May 2016, petapixel.com/2016/05/06/botched-steve-mccurry-print-leads-photoshop-scandal/.
Sel, Ahmet. “Photographer Steve McCurry Biography.” National Geographic, 25 Apr. 2016, www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/m/photographer-steve-mccurry/.
“Steve McCurry.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 July 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McCurry.
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