Cavalier Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of works by lauded photojournalist Steve McCurry, best known for his captivating portrait of Sharbat Gula, the Afghan Girl who graced the cover of National Geographic in 1984. In the forty years since, McCurry has continued to travel the world in search of beauty and wonder amidst storms and conflict, the mundane and the historic, as an artist-documentarian of both the human spirit and the spirit of place. The solo exhibition at 530 West 24th Street features more than 30 photographs from the 1980s to today, created in nations across the globe, including Cuba, Ethiopia, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tibet. A pendant exhibition will be on simultaneous view at Cavalier Ebanks Galleries, 175 Greenwich Avenue, Greenwich, Connecticut.
The exhibition celebrates the release of McCurry’s latest book, Devotion: Love and Spirituality, and the artist will be present at the Chelsea gallery for a reception and book signing on Thursday, February 22, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by the book’s cover image—McCurry’s 1994 photograph Monks Praying at Golden Rock, Kyaikto. The photograph, depicting Buddhist monks at the famous pilgrimage site in Myanmar, is a beautiful marriage of subject and form. A massive granite boulder, shrouded in gold leaves by devotees, gleams in the glow of a sun low on the horizon. Deep shadows anchor the rock on its mesmerizing perch at a cliff’s edge, while monks in red garments stand directly behind, sentinels whose posture bridges the firmness of earth and the gradated blue void of sky, their presence providing a critical balance to the self-contained universe of the image. The picture plane holds the rock in space, its golden pagoda cropped from view, a sublime tension pervading the composition. The photograph, so granular in its subject, is also a beautifully abstract ode to the trinity of primary colors, the red, blue, and yellow from which all other hues are made.
Color plays a vibrant role in McCurry’s art—the saturated green of a Yemeni clover field, the bright crimson cloth held aloft by a Namibian shepherd boy, the pink procession in McCurry’s famous photograph of nuns walking the rain-mirrored streets of Yangon. Yet the heart and soul of a McCurry photograph is always the human story. The centerpiece of the installation is a wall of eight portraits, faces across time and place, in various seasons of life, marked by personal narratives, yet all exhibiting an arresting sense of self through McCurry’s lens. One can perceive the mutual respect between photographer and subject, an intimacy born of human kinship which in turn offers viewers an extraordinary moment of grace.
McCurry’s art is transportive—from the intimate landscapes of the human face to wondrous expanses of earth and sky, such as in Golden Bridge, Da Nang (Vietnam, 2019), to the universal bonds of family and friendship, as in A Grandmother Takes Her Granddaughter Home (India, 2012). Many images explore the interconnectedness of people and planet, as well as humanity’s relationships with the animal kingdom, as in Mahout and His Elephant, Chiang Mai (Thailand, 2010) and Himba Shepherds Take Their Goats to Graze (Namibia, 2023). Indeed, it is McCurry’s ability to capture something of both the universal and the eternal in his images that transcends the journalistic enterprise.
Published extensively in books, magazines, and other media, and exhibited in museums around the world, McCurry’s photographs have earned him numerous accolades over the past half century, from the Robert Capa Gold Medal early in his career (1980) to his more recent Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society in London (2014). In 2019, McCurry was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. Steve McCurry’s singular passion and purpose have generated his greatest and ongoing achievement: helping to tell the human story of life on earth in the 20th and 21st centuries. The photographs on view in this solo exhibition represent a mere fraction of his gift to the world.
On view: February 8–March 9, 2024
View the exhibition online at cavaliergalleries.com.
About Steve McCurry
Steve McCurry has been one of the most iconic figures in contemporary photography for more than five decades. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, McCurry studied cinematography at Pennsylvania State University, before going on to work for a newspaper. After two years, McCurry made his first of what would become many trips to India. Traveling with little more than a bag of clothes and film, he made his way across the subcontinent, exploring the country with his camera.
It was after several months of travel that he crossed the border into Pakistan. In a small village, he met a group of refugees from Afghanistan, who smuggled him across the border into their country, just as the Russian invasion was closing the country to Western journalists. Emerging in traditional dress, with a full beard and weather-worn features after months embedded with the Mujahideen, McCurry made his way over the Pakistan border with his film sewn into his clothes.
McCurry’s images were among the first to show the world the brutality of the Russian invasion. Since then, McCurry has gone on to create unforgettable images over all seven continents and numerous countries. His body of work spans conflicts, vanishing cultures, ancient traditions, and contemporary culture alike – yet always retains the human element that made his celebrated photograph of the Afghan Girl such a powerful image.
