The eyes still glare that has not softened. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes-then and now-burn with ferocity. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. Names have power, so let us speak of hers. When McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her. Her village is a six-hour drive and three-hour hike across a border that swallows lives. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora.
They had lived at the camp together as children. No, said a man who got wind of the search. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn’t her. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film’s EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes.
She became known around National Geographic as the “Afghan girl,” and for 17 years no one knew her name. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. “I didn’t think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day,” he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan’s refugees. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. The photographer remembers the moment too. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since. This story appeared in the April 2002 issue of National Geographic magazine.