Steve McCurry: The Unguarded Moment Overview
The title of this book is a phrase that Steve McCurry uses a lot when talking about his work - he is always trying to capture those 'unguarded moments' when people are at their most unselfconscious and natural. McCurry takes photographs all over the world, for National Geographic magazine and his own projects, so this book includes the places, colours and forms of Yemen, Mali, Niger, Chad, India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), France and the former Yugoslavia, among others. "The Unguarded Moment" is the same size as South Southeast, but apart from the wider range of countries and continents covered, another key difference between the two titles is that all the images in this new book are landscape format. In "The Unguarded Moment", people go about their everyday business in extraordinary circumstances and settings, like the young tea vendor wading through the waist-deep monsoon waters in India, the fishermen casting their nets in the Niger river in Mali's Sahel Desert and the boy working in a candy factory in Kabul, Afghanistan. This book includes striking portraits of a Tuareg woman in Mali, an intense you ng gypsy boy in Marseille, France and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. There are children paying close attention to their teachers in school rooms in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, as well as five young monks happily playing with computer games at a monastery in India, just like any other boys their age would.
Customer Reviews
McCurry's specialty is the quick, unposed, snapshot of people otherwise occupied in getting along with their lives: here is the child at play, the fishermen casting their nets, people at work, fighting against the elements. This is what he calls the unguarded moment - the moment when people are at their most unselfconscious and natural. In short, here are people going about their everyday business in extraordinary circumstances and settings.
The key to McCurry's work is his ability to see fascination in the scene, and then the ability to frame his pictures to get just the right view. And this he has to do in mere moments to capture the instant when his subjects are at their most interesting. Then, in real life they go on to completing their task, the fisherman's net hits the water but the storytelling moment has been captured.
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