“Some photographers can make a great portrait of someone looking away from the camera,” Steve McCurry says, “but, for me, it all comes down to the eyes. I always want my subjects to be looking directly into my lens. That has become a kind of style, I guess; a way of shooting and a way of seeing.”
McCurry, 61, is one of the world’s greatest photojournalists, a master of colour and composition, as well as a humanist in a genre increasingly given over to the shockingly graphic. His new book is called simply and confidently The Iconic Photographs. Few other living photographers could get away with that title: “It wasn’t my idea,” he says, laughing, “but it kind of works.”
