ON a sticky, overcast evening at a farmhouse out of Delhi, Steve McCurry is trying hard to chill out after an assignment gone awry. It isn't easy though: the air is still and hot, and a late sun is getting in his eyes, not very comforting for a person who has suffered a detached retina and a cataract. The morning papers tell a story about McCurry, one of the world's best-known photographers, being detained by the police in the badlands of Assam while on assignment. "It was nothing very big," says McCurry, lighting up a cigarette. "Things like this happen."
As McCurry tells it, he was on an assignment for Geo, Germany, to shoot a story on Assam—a three-week cross-country whirligig shooting tribes, tea gardens, oil refineries, Brahmaputra, the usual thing. In Dibrugarh, a Keystone cop chase to trace local militiamen climaxed in a meeting. Then McCurry and the writer on the story entered Bhutan to rest for the night. Next day, when they arrived at the airport to take a flight to Guwahati, the cops intercepted them, took them to a grubby police station, and spent the better part of the afternoon asking them questions. "It was nothing unusual. The cops asked us where we'd gone, whom we'd met, that sort of thing," says McCurry.
Things like this keep happening to McCurry. Chasing the monsoon in Goa 16 years ago, his head hit a rock after he slipped and fell off a bridge while taking pictures in the pounding rain. Next day, he woke up in a hospital with an intravenous drip in his right hand and a blood-soaked patient in manacles in the neighbouring cot. A few years later, shooting the festival of the elephant god for the National Geographic, he nearly drowned off the Chowpatty beach in Mumbai as a mob of revellers turned on him. They thrashed him in neck-deep water and trashed his camera and lenses. Ten years ago, he suffered from a retinal detachment in the right eye after his two-seater airplane crashed in the waters of a lake in Slovenia during an aerial shooting session. In Shanghai, a gargantuan glass door collapsed on his hand and smashed his elbow. McCurry has also been nabbed and chained in Pakistan while trying to cross into Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, nearly shot at by a mujahid in the anarchic wastelands of the war-ravaged country and has even been reported dead twice.
Yet, McCurry, son of an electrical engineer father and homemaker mom, doesn't fancy calling himself a war photographer. This for a man who cut his teeth famously crossing into rebel-controlled Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion in 1979, and coming out with rolls of film sewn into his clothes. (These were the first pictures of the conflict that defined the cold war in the '80s and won him a slew of international awards). This for a man who has been in the thick of war and revolutions: Iran-Iraq, Beirut, Cambodia, the Gulf War, the fall of the Marcoses in the Philippines, the fission of Yugoslavia. For a man who was born in a drowsy Philadelphia suburb and went to an indifferent film school to graduate desultorily in cinematography and history, it was a desperate aching for the buzz, a craving to be where the action is that propelled him to the hot zones around the world. Those days are long gone. "These days, I want to do work which is deeper. I want to take pictures which have more lasting value than a news story," says McCurry, 51.
It is a quality that is possibly inherent in McCurry's work. Though his war pictures have the haunting evanescence that is the hallmark of standout war images, McCurry's most memorable pictures have been of people, places and natural elements like, say, rain. Washed in florid colours, his pictures freeze everyday life—like his famous frame of a mother and child pressed against the foggy backseat window of a cab in rain-washed Mumbai—and often give them a noir feel. "I like a kind of flat light to give my pictures a flat, diffused look. I don't quite like sunny pictures," he says. "My favourite light is found on an overcast day. On a sunny day, people's eyes squint. I love monsoons, a dark and rainy afternoon."
So it's not surprising that McCurry's four books so far straddle such 'pacifist' themes as the monsoon, portraits, travel (a book jointly with Paul Theroux) and images from around South Asia (his latest is a 70-picture collection of the best images from Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Vietnam). Photographer and peer Raghu Rai, who has known McCurry for a while, finds his colours interesting. "He loves these bright and vivid colours which make for pretty powerful images," says Rai. "A banquet for the eyes," screams a publicity promo for his new book.
And it sates you completely. Most of McCurry's work has been with the National Geographic—he is one of the journal's favourite photographers—among them, a riveting photo-essay on the glam and low life of Sunset Boulevard, vignettes of a changing and unchanging India on its 50th anniversary of independence, an unforgettable portrait of a girl from an Afghan refugee camp. "I don't want the news to set my agenda," he says. "I want to do work which in some ways will be timeless." Timeless work for McCurry is Henri Cartier-Bresson's pictures, whose work looks like it's "touched by the Gods" ("How the hell did he produce such work?"), a Stanley Kubrick or an Orson Welles film.
Which is not to say that McCurry keeps away from the buzz these days. He lives in New York and keeps coming back to India—he has been here over 60 times in 21 years. "In school and college, I caught the travel bug and went around the world. The one place I had missed was India. So after I chucked up a little newspaper job and began travelling again hoping to become a magazine photographer, I came to India. It blew me away." The call of the unexpected makes him return here again and again. No wonder then that most of his upcoming projects have a link with India: McCurry is trying to edit and hive off 22 years of his work into a book on India, another one on Buddhism which will include India. He is also shooting 15 expatriate Hindu families in worship for an exhibition at New York's Museum of Natural History—a pictorial treatise on a diaspora's relationship with religion.
In India, McCurry says, he has learnt to watch and wait on life. "If you wait, people would forget your camera and the soul world drifts into view." So much of India's public life is played out in the open—in its cities, villages, its killing fields. So when Steve McCurry goes on the road again in this troubled subcontinent, the trifles about cops and daggers matter little. The picture is the story.