The Nine Lives of Steve McCurry

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Q: Was there something about your upbringing that made you want to seek out more chaotic, less orderly places?
I was always kind of active and a bit rebellious. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't travel anywhere until I was 19. I think maybe it was all a bit too bland. I figured I'd go to a new part of the world where I hadn't been. I was going to spend three months in India, and then I was going to go to Cyprus or Turkey. But I ended up spending two years in India without ever coming back. I had a fair amount of money saved, about $9,000. When you're living on $5 a day in India, that goes pretty far. I was able to survive for about two years. There was the occasional small magazine story, but when I got into Afghanistan, I got into the major league of magazines.

Q: When did you get into photography?
When I was at Penn State, I started out studying film history-cinematography-and went from that to filmmaking and graduated with a degree in theater arts. While I was in filmmaking, I started doing a lot of still photography and working for the school newspaper and drifted into doing stills for films. I started looking at a lot of photography books-by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Once I got out of school, I never was involved in filmmaking again.Q: Your work is associated more with National Geographic than anything else. How did you break in there?
They asked me if I could get into Baluchistan in Pakistan. I assured them that I could, but after we had lunch, I was convinced I hadn't made a very good presentation of myself. But they ended up giving me the assignment and another story on a Pakistani tribe called the Kalash. I ended up spending six months working on the Baluchistan story, and they wound up killing it because the text wasn't good. I had been put in jail with my guide for that story. After the first night, this guard put us in leg irons connected to a column.

Q: What was going through your mind then?
I was certain that they were going to deport me. I was really depressed, because I thought I had blown my career with National Geographic, but apart from that, I was thinking, how long am I going to be here? I could be here for weeks or months. I thought maybe they're going to make an example of me and keep me here indefinitely. They weren't feeding us. We had to give money to guards and prison staff to bring us cookies or tea. But after four days, they let us go without an explanation. They didn't deport us, so we went right back to work. Then Geographic killed it. But they did use the Kalash story, and then I did another one and another one, and now it's been 18 years of working with Geographic.

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