Afghan girl in famed photo found again

By Gregg Zoroya
USA Today

	STEVE MCCURRY, 1984 and 2002 Sharbat Gula captivated readers with her haunting eyes when she appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, left. Time and hardship have erased her youth, but her gaze still challenges in her January photo.

The beautiful and previously anonymous Afghan girl featured in one of the past century's most enduring portrait photographs — and what became National Geographic magazine's most famous cover image — has been found living in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan.

She has weathered and aged from a life of poverty but still has the same haunting green eyes.

Steve McCurry, an award-winning photographer who took her picture during a five-minute session in a Pakistan refugee camp in 1984, led a team from National Geographic that tracked her down in January. The magazine announced the discovery yesterday and identified her as Sharbat Gula, perhaps 29 or 30 years old today — she isn't sure of her age — the mother of three girls and the wife of a baker.

"The instant I saw her I knew that this was the Afghan girl," McCurry says. "Her eyes still have that penetrating sort of look, that kind of intensity."

Her life over the years has been marred by the death of a child, by the loss of her parents during the Afghan war with the Soviet Union and by poverty.

"I wouldn't characterize her as having lived a happy life," McCurry says.

It was news to Sharbat Gula that the photograph taken years before had been so widely distributed and elicited such an overwhelming response, McCurry says.

"I don't think a day has gone by in the last 17 years that I haven't gotten some kind of a letter or e-mail or a phone-call request, people wanting to send her money and people wanting to adopt her, letters from men wanting to find her and marry her," he says.

"It's certainly the most memorable image that we have ever published," says William Allen, editor in chief of National Geographic, which has a circulation of nearly 10 million. "I have been asked hundreds of times, 'Whatever happened to that girl, the one with the green eyes?' "

Originally shot for an article about life along the Pakistani-Afghan border, the photo has been compared in iconic significance with such other famous 20th-century images as the Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph of World War II by Joe Rosenthal, the fatal shooting of Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald captured on film by Dallas Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson and W. Eugene Smith's picture of a child crippled by industrial poisoning being bathed by her mother in Japan.

McCurry, 51, a free-lance photographer who owns the rights to the photo, says that because he didn't have an interpreter on the day the photo was taken, he didn't get the girl's name. It wasn't until he was back in Washington, D.C., developing the film that he fully realized its unusual significance. The photo was published in January 1985.

"It was one of those incredible, amazing moments in photography where everything comes together," he says.

But he wasn't able to find her until he mounted a concerted effort in January. The refugee camp in Pakistan where she was originally photographed, and where leads on her whereabouts might still exist, was slated to be razed. He tracked a number of leads, all of them fruitless, until an intermediary finally arranged a meeting with Sharbat Gula.

McCurry says that the woman, who is a conservative Pashtun, sought her husband's permission to lift the veil of her burqa in order to show her face for photographs to be taken. Later, sophisticated iris-recognition tools and FBI facial-identification techniques were used on the photographs of her then and now to verify they had the right woman.

McCurry and the magazine are keeping the woman's exact whereabouts a secret at the request of her and her husband. She was found somewhere between Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani border city of Peshawar. They are also working with the family to see how they might somehow benefit, financially or otherwise, from the global success of her image.

The story will be featured in the April issue of National Geographic.

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