Posted on 03/13/2002 10:15:56 AM PST by ThePythonicCow
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For nearly two decades, National Geographic (news - web sites) has been flooded with requests for information about a beautiful Afghan teen-ager with piercing green eyes whose cover image became one of its most recognized photographs.
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"Every time I went there (to Afghanistan or Pakistan), I asked about her, but I never had any leads," freelance photographer Steve McCurry, who took the picture for National Geographic in 1984, told Reuters.
McCurry says hardly a day has gone by that people have not asked him about the young woman, whose name he did not take down when he took her picture for the January 1985 cover of National Geographic.
This January, he returned with a National Geographic team to the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan where he took the picture and found someone who said he grew up with the woman's brother.
"The refugee camp was set to close and so I knew this was my only chance to find her," said McCurry. "I couldn't believe it when the brother finally turned up with his sister. I knew immediately it was her."
The woman, who is now about 30 years old, was identified as Sharbat Gula. She remembered McCurry taking the picture but had never seen a copy of it and was surprised and embarrassed by all the attention it attracted.
Gula got married shortly after McCurry first saw her and had four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. She was repatriated from the camp in 1992 and returned to Afghanistan with her family.
Her life had been tough in Afghanistan and McCurry said she had struggled to survive.
"What the second picture shows is that she is still alive and survived quite well in fact ... but that pain and hardship is still written in her face. It is not a face of joy," he added.
NEW PHOTOS TAKEN
A conservative Pashtun, Gula sought her husband's permission to lift her veil to show her face for the latest photographs, which appear in National Geographic's April edition.
McCurry said he saw Gula as a representative of the plight of the Afghan people, who endured an extended war with the Soviet Union and the rise and fall of the Taliban.
"She's really emblematic of the Afghan spirit," he said, adding that a education fund had been set up by National Geographic for young Afghan girls.
National Geographic used several scientific methods to ensure they had found the right woman, including iris recognition in which the colored portion of the eye is examined.
No two human irises are the same and a direct match holds a near 100 percent probability of authenticity, National Geographic said. The woman's eyes were found to be a perfect match.
Do you suppose they're looking at the picture wondering where the plane is?
We might have hit another new low on FR. Bashing a poor refugee for not being a babe.
I don't have my photo on my FR profile, but I do have this:We spend our lives going from one pair of eyes to another,one set of expectations to the next, looking for ourselves until one day,if we are lucky, we stop and decide to look inside, where, indeed,beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
It's something to think about.
She just got back from the mall, you know, and she couldn't wait to show them off to her friends, Buffy Muhamid and Muffy Adhib so she had her picture taken by an international photographer but, you know, like, this war broke out, which, you know, really put a damper on her day. You know?
As for poster above stating that she had 3 living daughters but no sons, Muslim men to whom sons are important usually take a second wife to improve the genetic odds...
But in a country where young women can sometimes be bought for $50, her (teenage) looks look like $2500 country to me...and she would probably still be snapped up if she suffered a divorce.
As to posters above saying that she had to ask her husband's permission to lift her veil, I would say that would be just a decent civil and customary thing for ANY married woman to do in a Muslim nation, and even in America if a woman's image were to be widely distributed and made available, a virtual second career in a sense, wouldn't it be nice to see how her husband felt about it?
I feel sure that in order to obtain her travel and co-operation to visit this photographer in the comfort of Pakistan, etc. that an amount changed hands, which I shall estimate at $12,000 USA.
Inshallah, in Afghanistan that will keep her and her family in comfortable circumstances for life, and by local standards my feeling is they already were...
I remember that cover and those haunting eyes. National Geographic has used it several times since then. It's good to know that she survived the Taliban. But it's also tragic to see those years etched in a face that captivated so many for so long.
SHE IS A POOR REFUGEE!! Don't you get it? That woman is lucky to be alive. Who cares that she doesn't use Crest with Extra Whitening and Tartar Control or goes for her twice yearly cleaning. Just the fact that she is still breathing on this planet is a blessing.
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