The narrative poetics of an artist who narrated man through gazes.
Body and soul in the eyes. The poetics of the gazes of Steve McCurry has become an iconic representation of humanity on the move, in a constant, tireless and fascinating search for the roots of the history and communities that populate the planet.
One of the greatest masters of contemporary photography documents forty years of travelling the world, investigating the thoughts and emotions of peoples, people encountered along the way, cultures that intersect and unravel in the eyes that stare into the artist's lens, in a continuous dialogue with the observer.
And those portraits, which have now become part of the common imagination, leave no escape, they capture you, run through you with all their power and hold you in a grip from which it is difficult to
enfranchise.
Those eyes, those same gazes, those souls standing out against contexts that have now become dramatically anonymous, acquire a very precise identity, speak a voice that continues to echo in the mind, with a persistence that is dizzying. Who has not sculpted in their mind the green, almost ghostly eyes of Sharbat Gulathe girl made famous by the front page of the National Geographicmet by the photographer in the Peshawar refugee camp in Pakistan...
The ruined streets of Afghanistan, the poorest villages of Burma, the remotest corners of Brazil or Japan, distant pieces of the world, each with its own history, dramas and contradictions, are the desolate or crowded scenarios from which the stories, through the faces, of so many men and women, expressions of a unique beauty and sensuality but also of a crude realism, come to life and relief.
The narrative picture that emerges is of an intense wandering humanity, to which one feels one belongs and whose expressive code goes beyond the already not simple representational art of photography, to arrive at a poetics of empathy through and with the gaze, the only way to get from the surface to the depths.
Man as a whole becomes the protagonist of that moment captured by the lens, but also of a more universal and transversal story. The stories of the men and women portrayed thus become the stories of all, enclosed in the magical, polychrome box of eyes that have become emblematic, catalysts of a common spirit, in the sense that it is immanent to the human race.
Watching McCurry's shots one therefore has the impression, perhaps better said the feeling, of being part of every culture, every country, every time and historical moment, every contingency and every genre, in a common denominator that passes through the eyes, bridges to a spiritual, true and authentic union.
With McCurry we are all part of a whole.
