The power of play in Steve McCurry

What is the meaning of play for Steve McCurry? What is the meaning of play for one of modern photography’s most famous lenses? In the work of the native of Philadelphia this concept plays a fundamental role, unleashing all its primordial force, its evocative capacity, its ritual charm.

The representation of the game in McCurry is Huizingian: a free and instinctive practice, which tends to a natural pleasure, intrinsic to the human being. Born in 1950, the American photojournalist has widely documented this phenomenon during his numerous travels, studying peoples and cultures also through the medium of play.

McCurry, member since 1986 of the Magnum Photos cenacle, was made immortal by the shot ‘Afghan Girl’, taken in a Pakistani refugee camp: a portrait that quickly became the most recognized photograph in the National Geographic history. Some of his many solo exhibitions, organized all over the world, have seen the game as the main protagonist.

We pay homage to this thematic thread through the selection of 10 emblematic, highly evocative shots, capable of defining McCurry’s playful photography. Images, moments that unite Madagascar to India, Myanmar to Brazil, in a single enormous playground.