by Caroline Fleischauer
Amid a sea of tents slips a White man holding a camera. It’s 1984 and the camera—a Nikon FM2 with a Nikkor 105mm Ai-S F2.5 lens—is powerful enough to share grief between one side of the world and the other. The tent village sits across Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, near Peshawar. The people who live there are fleeing the violence of the Soviet invasion in their homeland.
The man walking through the camp, holding his camera, hears laughter coming from one of the tents. He pushes back the door flap and enters. Inside are a group of young girls sitting on the floor, in the middle of a lesson—the man has stumbled into an elementary school. The heads and faces of the girls are visible, their eyes glowing in the light emanating from beyond the open doorway. The eyes of one girl in particular catch the man’s notice. They are a striking green color, unusual in this part of the world. The man asks to take the girl’s picture, the words flowing out of his mouth and reformed by a translator. The man approaches the girl, holds up his camera, speaks again to her in a language she does not understand. He wants to take her picture.
The man takes the girl’s picture.
Back in the United States, those green eyes stare out at the man through the dark sheen of development fluid. They go on to stare out at the world from the 1985 cover of National Geographic magazine. They win awards, the man’s name attached to the photo he names “Afghan Girl.” The photograph is likened to DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa.” The man is celebrated, achieves celebrity, goes on to international acclaim.
The girl with the eyes, the real eyes, disappears into the mass of homeless bodies somewhere that is not the West. For seventeen years, she exists in two places: in a celebrated photo, and in a body marked by the harsh realities of living as a refugee.
But there’s another way to tell this story.
In 1984, in Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan, a White man from America intrudes on a daily lesson in an Islamic school for little girls. One, ten-years-old and a Pashtun, hides her face in her hands. It is against her religion for her face to be seen by a man outside of her family. Only her green eyes are visible, eyes she shares with a brother and a maternal grandmother, a grandmother who was killed in her home country of Afghanistan, along with her mother. She spent days traversing the Spīn Ghar Range separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, fleeing with her father and siblings to a refugee camp, escaping the violence in their home country. A refugee camp where she has now lived for years in relative safety. She covers her face with her hands.
The teacher commands her to remove her hands and face covering for this strange man. To expose herself to his groping lens. To show her face to the world, to show them the face of a refugee.
The man takes her to the back of the school where there is more natural light. Where he has more control over the image. Her image. He poses her looking over one shoulder, like an ‘80s glamor model. Her eyes, reflecting the power of the camera, the man’s gaze, are fearful yet defiant. When the man takes a break, the girl runs out of the tent, disappearing into the labyrinthine tent paths of the camp.
The man does not ask her name that day. He does not ask her name for seventeen years.
When Sharbat Gula is ten-years-old, Steve McCurry takes her photo in the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan. He does not record her name, nor ask permission from her father to take her photo as custom dictates. The image is disseminated anyway. Under the moniker “Afghan Girl,” the photo is shared with nearly two million people worldwide. Her face graces gallery walls and the inside of people’s homes for $18,000 a print.
Sharbat Gula, the flesh-and-blood girl, is married between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. She bears her husband four children, three daughters and a son, the first of whom dies in infancy. They settle into their lives in Pakistan, not the country of her birth but her home for thirty-five years before she is rediscovered.
In 2002, National Geographic presented a documentary about McCurry returning to Pakistan to find the Afghan Girl. From the outset, the television special presents McCurry as an authoritative figure of the “war-torn country,” despite his inability to communicate with locals in a language other than English and his frustration with gendered cultural norms. “I can’t get those eyes out of my head,” comments McCurry, while narrator Sigourney Weaver notes that they are “eyes that reflect the anguish of refugees worldwide.” A sentiment, it is implied, that McCurry understands well.
History repeats itself when an extended segment of the documentary is devoted to McCurry once again taking a picture of a young Afghan refugee girl with striking eyes. The girl smiles, appearing to enjoy herself, in contrast to what Sharbat Gula later shares as her initial experience with the photographer. “I remember you,” she says softly upon their reunion, pulling the draping fabric of her head covering more fully over her face.
But it is not McCurry alone who is the cause of Gula’s pain. Through the lens of his camera, he intrudes into her lived experience and objectifies her as an Other, an object of speculation for the West, a metonym for suffering in less-developed countries. The viewer is also implicit in this objectification. McCurry took the photograph, but it is the Western consumers who buy it, lauding the girl’s—now woman’s—exotic beauty. McCurry is the figurehead for ‘discovering’ another culture with his camera, for popularizing the plight of refugees on the other side of the world, but with this exploration comes exploitation. In 2020, the iconic image sold for €62,000 at a Polish auction, roughly $72,000. Gula, the subject, has seen none such royalties.
The role of the artist is to record the world around them. Whether through images or words, the artist asks questions about life and how we live it. The role of a journalist is a bit different, to record life as it is for informational purposes. A journalist is meant to be objective, to simply bear witness to joy and to suffering simultaneously, without imposing their own opinions or emotions onto the facts. And yet, harm can be imposed by witnessing and doing nothing, taking no action, or remaining silent.
For there is complicity in witnessing—to be the lone Other privy to another’s story. There is a weight that must be carried when one looks out upon the suffering of others but takes no action to attempt to alleviate it. Photojournalist Kevin Carter won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his photograph “The Struggling Girl.” The image depicts a Sudanese toddler attempting to crawl toward a feeding center in Sudan while a vulture looks on during the famine of 1993. At the time, Carter told a colleague that after taking the shot, he had chased the vulture away, that all he could think of as he stared at the starving, emaciated child was his daughter. Carter took his life mere months after winning the prestigious award. To witness violence, to record it, to see the subject at the end of one’s lens as more than an object takes its toll.
Facts are only stories that have become widely accepted. Often, they can be proven in a way that makes others believe. For example, Fact: Steve McCurry took Sharbat Gula’s picture. The picture exists. But the girl in it did not truly exist, for McCurry or those around the world viewing the image. The girl herself became a symbol of the refugee crisis. Donations to refugee aid organizations increased exponentially after the image was published on the cover of National Geographic. Later, the photo was used to promote Afghan women’s rights in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the United States. But the girl herself became as one-dimensional as the glossy image, a symbol, not a living being.
It took forensic experts and iris identification technology to match up the girl with her woman counterpart nearly twenty years later. Little tied the two together, except the eyes that so captivated first McCurry and then the world. This woman, this living, breathing woman, curtailed the romance of the “Afghan Girl.” She had grown up, out from in front of the lens of the camera, into a woman who had faced disease, childbirth, and death. Who was now being persecuted for her role in a past that did not belong to her, a pawn in the story of refugee return, of the Western gaze. McCurry and his team claim that they tried to find her long before the National Geographic feature documenting their search. But I have to wonder about the truth in that. After all, no one truly wants to find the women that girls become, that they grow up to be.
Global recognition initially did little for Gula. While her photo led to wealth and prestige for McCurry, for her, it led to arrest, imprisonment, and deportation from Pakistan for having illegal papers. Her face was now recognized as that of a refugee, world famous but not legal. Having lived the majority of her life in Pakistan, Gula was exiled to the land of her birth to become a reluctant spokeswoman for her country of origin, though perhaps not her home. In one interview, she stares off from the camera with the two male hosts sitting beside her, dressed in sharp suits. They ask what message she has for her fellow Afghans. A loaded question. In a low voice, she intones, “I wish to tell my countryfolk to return to their own country. There is no place like home.” Her notoriety, unknown for the majority of her life, thrusting her into a life she did not choose, did not want.
Photographer Tony Northrup notes that “[p]hotojournalism has been guilty of awful abuses throughout history, often exploiting the poor for profit and celebrity.” I, too, am complicit in Gula’s suffering. As is everyone who has ever exclaimed over her photo on the cover of National Geographic. In this exploration of her story, I put words in her mouth that I gleaned from video clips, her demeanor in many suggesting a lack of total consent to be interviewed and recorded, impose my own thoughts upon her. Perhaps in writing this I do the opposite of what I intend, colonizing her story. I can’t speak to her; it is not her voice in this piece but an echo, paling in comparison. A White woman trying to make sense of a seeming injustice perpetuated by a White man, while both inadvertently strip a refugee woman of color of her agency, of her voice. All in the name of art.
To be an artist is to see human beings through a particular lens. To note their joy, their suffering, their trauma, without necessarily empathizing or taking part, but giving it shape and form. To be an artist is often to take without giving back in kind. Through a camera lens or words on a page, a human being is reduced to an object worthy of exploration or further study— Something to be examined but not necessarily known beyond a pair of green eyes.
I do not know Sharbat Gula. I cannot know her, cannot truly understand her past and present, so different from my own on the other side of the world. I cannot speak with her or hear her voice besides through the medium of a recording, scripted and insincere. But maybe I can extend some modicum of understanding in the vein of what it means to be a woman, to be the subject of someone else’s story without consent or simultaneous narration. To be the object at the end of a lens, not recognizing the person squinting through the viewfinder at the other end, or the eyes that stare out of an image someone else claims is of you.
Caroline Fleischauer’s work appears in Barren Magazine, Pidgeonholes, The Lindenwood Review, and is forthcoming in MAYDAY. She reads for The Adroit Journal and earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming. She was shortlisted for Fractured Literary’s 2021 Micro Contest. Originally from Ithaca, New York, she currently resides in Bloemfontein, South Africa where she teaches English as an English Language Fellow at the University of the Free State.