Steve McCurry Response

I was really impressed with Steve McCurry’s work. To me, McCurry is a really good example of how color can be really effective in photo journalism. His photographs are so colorful and so well composed that it seems impossible that they could be real. It’s almost funny to me that photojournalists resisted using color for so long because it was not “serious” when here, McCurry uses color so well. It is even more interesting because I found out, when watching a video McCurry did for the museum, that before going to India he primarily worked in black and white, but he felt that he could not tell the story of India without showing in color. I cannot help but agree with him. Although these photos would probably still be great in black and white, because he is such a great photographer, they are greatly enhanced by their use of color. I think a lot of photographers find color difficult, because when trying to make a photograph cohesive, color can make it even harder. However, I feel that McCurry is telling a story that is as much about color as it is about the people or the places he photographed.  He says that so much of Indian culture is about color, and that he is glad he ultimately made the transition from black and white to color because ultimately the world we live in is in color. Thats intresting to me, because the first word I came up with to describe his photographs was otherworldly or maybe even cinematic. They almost seem to perfectly colorful, and too perfectly composed to not be set up. For example, one of my favorite photos shows a man at the Holi festival. He is he covered in green powder, and everyone surrounding him is covered in red powder. Those are pretty much the only two colors in the entire photo. At least for my understanding (which is pretty limited), the festival uses a lot more colors than that, so it seems really amazing to me that he was able to capture this photo. To me, it really seems like scene out of a movie. It seems like McCurry’s work, at least in this serious, is about setting the scene, more than it is about getting as much information in the phot as possible. 

Another thing I think is interesting to think about is McCurry’s position as an outsider in a new culture. I think I’m always a little sceptical of when an American or European man goes to an “Eastern” land to attempt to depict their culture. I wonder how much of their work is just reproducing stereotypes about the culture they already have in their work. So I think going into the exhibit, I was really skeptical. However, I didn’t get that feeling at all from McCurry’s work. It’s difficult for me to actually put a finger on why, other than the fact that the people he photographs seem extremely comfortable with him, and often seem proud, happy, or defiant, which is contrast to the photographs we usually see of India, which seem to only focus on the squalor of slums and malnourished children. That isn’t to say that photographs depicting those things are unimportant or invaliding in anyway, but I really appreciate how you can really see that McCurry loves India in these photos, and is really fascinated by their culture.