The World, Through Her Eyes

Shells pounding, guns blowing, heads of snipers sticking behind dunes. While playgrounds doubled into shootout sites, roads ran for miles together without a soul in sight. Supermarkets lost the chatter, and families lost their appetite. Held up in rubbles, mothers kissed their children like it was the last time they were seeing them. Much like adult men, laughter went missing, while their wives waited in silence for starvation and violation.

In 1979, Afghanistan was stormed into by the USSR troops, following which was a nine-year-long brutal conflict. Hundred thousand soviet soldiers took control of cities and highways of the neighboring nation, showing no mercy. While the Afghan resistance was supported by world leaders, the war left the people plainly devastated. It was the same year, American humanitarian photojournalist Steve McCurry crossed the Pakistan border to enter the heart of Afghanistan, Kabul, to cover the civil war, and journeyed his way to the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan intending to explore the refugee camps set up just outside Peshawar.

The pictures taken, teleport one into the lives of Turkoman refugees, who made traditional carpets for a living and walked miles to fetch water for sustenance. He stumbled upon the Nasir Bagh refugee camp and realized it was being used as a girls’ school. On being allowed to click a few pictures of the class in progress, Steve looked around, and his eyes fell upon a particular child with piercing eyes. Intense and haunting, her gaze penetrated through his heart, ripping it apart, and in a moment, through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl, he lived the misery of her people.

Steve took pictures of two other girls, waiting patiently to capture the portrait he flew from across the world for. As he adjusted his camera, she turned her head around in a swift motion, challenging the lens with fire and rage in her sea-green eyes, breathing life into a photograph that created waves around the globe. The image of her face, with a red scarf, draped loosely over her head and lines of a hard childhood around the corner of her mouth, she was later identified as Sharbat Gulla. A subject of much commentary upon its release, the photograph went on to find its place on the cover of the iconic National Geographic Magazine in 1985. While Gulla became the embodiment of the Afghan struggle for the western world the fury in her eyes igniting a fire in her viewer’s hearts, her image took precedence over herself. Romanticized about in articles and essays and spoken about as a harkening back in a discourse rife with political tension, she was left behind as a face with no voice, and as a motif with a history but no discernible future.