From “World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading” by Jeff Crosby
I recently attended an exhibit of more than 100 profoundly moving images taken by the famed photographer Steve McCurry. He may be best known for his 1984 portraiture of the green-eyed Afghan girl Sharbat Gula in a refugee camp outside Peshawar, Pakistan, in the midst of the Soviet Union’s invasion of her home country. That image was among those gathered at the Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago for the ICONS exhibit. As I suspected, it was riveting to come face-to-face with the image of Gala and her piercing green eyes in the photo that initially graced the June 1985 cover of National Geographic accompanying a story titled “Along Afghanistan’s War Torn Frontier.” Other images of people and places from around the world – Syria, India, Madagascar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar – and closer to home, including the September 11, 2001, devastation around New York City’s World Trade Center towers, graced the walls of several galleries in the museum. The images told stories of war, resilience, suffering, hope, family and cultures. But there was another aspect of ICONS that I didn’t expect to see,
A homage to the beauty, allure, and practice of reading around the world.
In room after room of the gallery, McCurry’s photos captured images of people reading in the midst of rubble and work and want and play. Sacred texts of the religions of the world spread out before readers on the ground, eyes attentively fixed on pages. Newspapers being read on the trunk of a taxicab in Mumbai, or on the platform of a train station in Kolkata. One of the most striking images showed a young man sitting on a large stone reading a paperback book, his back propped up against a massive elephant curled around the stone like a pillow.
What was it about reading around the world that captured the eyes and trained the lens of the famed photographer Steve McCurry?
“Reading is a serious matter, but readers are seldom lonely or bored, because reading is a refuge and an enlightenment,” writes Paul Theroux in the foreword to a collection of McCurry’s images in the book Steve McCurry: On Reading. “This wisdom is sometimes visible. It seems to me that there is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading.”