Power of Play

Ethiopia

It is a happy talent to know how to play.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fiji

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a
tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.
- Henri Matisse

Tibet

The true object of all human life is play.
- G. K. Chesterton

China

 

Afghanistan

 

India

 

Cambodia

Men do not quit playing because they grow old;
they grow old because they quit playing.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Tibet

 

India

Play is the exultation of the possible.
- Martin Buber

India

A child loves his play, not because it’s easy,
but because it’s hard.
- Benjamin Spock

Mauritania

People tend to forget that play is serious.
- David Hockney

Afghanistan

 

India

In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior.
In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.
- Lev Vygotsky

Burma

When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to
move beyond the bounds of reality.
A stick can be a magic wand. A sock can be a puppet.
A small child can be a superhero.
- Fred Rogers

Ethiopia

 

India

 

Mali

Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play;
music and dancing were pure play….
We have to conclude, therefore,
that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played…
- Johan Huizinga

Australia

 

Burma

Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.
- Diane Ackerman 

Ethiopia

 

Yemen

Play, while it cannot change the external realities of children’s lives,
can be a vehicle for children to explore and enjoy their differences and similarities,
and to create, even for a brief time, a more just world
where everyone is an equal and valued participant.
- Patricia G. Ramsey

India

India

Play is the highest form of research.
- attributed to Albert Einstein

India

 

Cuba

Sometimes you have to drop the rake and play in the leaves.
- Douglas V’Soske

Burma

 

India

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Steve’s New Portrait App Available Now:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/portraits-by-steve-mccurry/id589821521?mt=8

Food for the Soul

Conversation is food for the soul.
- Mexican Proverb

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

 The great secret of succeeding in conversation is to admire little, to hear much;
always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends;
never to pretend to wit, but to make that of others appear as much as possibly we can;
to hearken to what is said and to answer to the purpose.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

Yemen

The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense,
the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
- Sir William Temple, 1628-1699

Tanzania

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another’s observation, not overturning it.
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, 1803 – 1873

Morocco

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others.
- Jean de la Bruyere, 1803 – 1873

Italy

 The character of a man is known from his conversations.
- Menander, 342 – 292 BCE

Poet Khalil Khoury, Baghdad, Iraq

 

Japan

 

India

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery!
It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest,
of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.
- Guy de Maupassant, 1850 – 1893

Lourdes, France

 

China

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
-  Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, 1533 – 1592

Turkey

 

Russia

 

France

 

Afghanistan

A single conversation with a wise person is worth a month’s study of books.
- Chinese Proverb

Italy

India

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Tanzania

In my opinion, the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is in conversation.
I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose,
I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice.
- Michel de Montaigne

Tibet

The very act of preparing and serving tea encourages conversation.
The little spaces in time created by teatime rituals call out to be filled with conversation.
Even the tea itself–warm and comforting-inspires a feeling of relaxation and trust that fosters shared confidences.
Emilie Barnes, If Teacups Could Talk

Italy

The highest good is prayer and conversation with God.
- St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, 347–407

Paraguay

 

Steve McCurry in Omo Valley with men from Surma Tribe

 

PLEASE VISIT
http://www.imagine-asia.org

The Greatest Good

Niger

Music
The greatest good that mortals know
and all of heaven we have below.
- Joseph Addison

Yemen

Rocca Paolina, Perugia, Umbria, Italy 

Chitral, Pakistan

Karabash-i Veli,  Bursa, Turkey

Street Musician, Dublin, Ireland 

 Honduras

La Habana Vieja, Cuba

Music is the shorthand of emotion.
- Leo Tolstoy

A family plays music on the street hoping for a few rupees, India

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Berthold Auerbach

Angkor Wat temple complex, Cambodia

Two musicians practice for the Jazz Festival, Perugia, Italy

Music’s the medicine of the mind. 
- John A. Logan

 France

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
- Leonard Bernstein

 Kashmir

Herbie Hancock, Italy
Winner of 14 Grammy Awards, Hancock is a musical icon.

 Kalash Girl, Chitral District of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan

 When words leave off, music begins.
- Heinrich Heine

Khan Murjan restaurant in a 14th century building which
served as an inn for travellers and traders.  Baghdad, Iraq

Whiskey a Go Go, a fixture on the Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, California, United States

Pianist waits to perform in a supper club, Shanghai, China

Alto Churumazu, Peru

 Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.
- Alphonse de Lamartine

Marrakesh, Morocco

Traditional performers,  Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California

Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you,
music itself is not going to let you down.
- Virgil Thomson, Composer, Winner of the Pulitzer Price, 1949

Karabash-i Veli,  Bursa, Turkey

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!
- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Seal  greets Steve McCurry at concert, PhotoKina,Cologne, Germany
Courtesy of Matthias Krug,  September 17, 2012

CURRENT AND FUTURE EXHIBITIONS

Oeksnehallen, Copenhagen, Denmark – Ongoing
Gallery N, Seoul Arts Centre, Seoul, South Korea – Opening on September 12th, 2012
Leica Photokina, Hall 1, Cologne, Germany – September 18, 2012
Centro Municipal de Arte Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – October 6th, 2012
Plazzo Ducale, Genova, Italy – October 17, 2012
Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles – November 15, 2012
Chris Beetles Gallery, London, U.K. – January 15, 2013
Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg, Germany – January 19, 2013
Cavalier Gallery, Greenwich, CT – April 12 – May 6, 2013
Kunsthalle Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland – June 1, 2013

To Fly

To read is to fly:
it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view
over  wide terrains of history,
human variety, ideas, shared experience and the
fruits of many inquiries.
- A. C. Grayling

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.
They are the destination, and the journey.
They are home.
- Anna Quindlen

Germany

India 

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something,
learned something, become a better person.
Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on…
Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
- Nora Ephron

India

Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old, rich and poor, reading books.  
Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular, they are, for a time,
transported to  another world.

Thailand

India

Reading a good book is a universal activity, and people read while they do
just about everything else, and that includes reading while playing the
piano, which my sister used to do.

Sri Lanka

At one magical instant in your early childhood,
the page of a book–that string of confused, alien ciphers–shivered into meaning.
Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened.
You became, irrevocably, a reader.
- Alberto Manguel

Burma

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly,
into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Lourdes, France

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends;
they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the
most patient of teachers. 
- Charles William Eliot

Italy

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
- James Russell Lowell

India

We read to know we are not alone. 
- C.S. Lewis

Tibet

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
- Jorge Luis Borges

China

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still,
retreat or fly into the future.
- Jim Bishop

Thailand

That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book,
and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will
lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive
- all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

India

Kashmir

Korea

We live for books.
-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose 

Canada

Turkey

Afghanistan

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
- Victor Hugo

Italy 

Yemen

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the
most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
- Wisława Szymborska
1996 Nobel Prize in Literature

India

Cuba

Japan

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
- Rene Descartes

Upstairs, Downstairs

Burma

For centuries, stairs have symbolized journeys, rites of passage,
transitions, and stages of  life in art, literature, and music.

Tibet

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
‘Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
- William Butler Yeats

Italy

Stairs are climbed step by step.
- Turkish Proverb

Kashmir

Children’s stories tell tales of boys and girls discovering treasures upstairs in the
attic and fearing what is downstairs in the basement.

Afghanistan

Faith is taking the first step even when
you don’t see the whole staircase.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Burma

Morocco

India 

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe,
grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts,
emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
- John Steinbeck

Italy

Jodhpur, India

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be
through Earth’s loveliness.
- Michelangelo

Italy

Mt. Popa, Burma
The stairway climbs a 300-foot lava plug crowned by Buddhist temples.

Serbia

Mother to Son
Well, Son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor –
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now –
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
- Langston Hughes

New York, September 12, 2001 

Japan 

New York

Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where i sit.
there isn’t any
other stair
quite like
it.
i’m not at the bottom,
i’m not at the top;
so this is the stair
where
I always
stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And it isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn’t really
Anywhere!
It’s somewhere else
Instead!
- A.A. Milne

Italy

Haiku
Steep steps
Uneven treads
Life
- bmv

India 

Iraq 

India 

Afghanistan

Outsiders

Refugee Camp, Peshawar, Pakistan

While every refugee’s story is different and their anguish personal,
they all share a common thread of uncommon courage:
the courage not only to survive,
but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives.
- Antonio Guterres

Afghan refugee, Pakistan

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.
- Aeschylus

Refugee camp, Thailand

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.
― Carlos Fuentes

Kabul, Afghanistan

Italy

God dances with the outcast.
– Steven James

USA

The majority of Americans, who are comparatively well-off,
have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest
misery almost without noticing them.
- Gunnar Myrdal  

France

Gypsy Boy, Marseille, France

Gypsy Family, India

The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Afghanistan

War’s toll is etched on the faces at a shelter for the mentally ill in Kabul.

Prison, Pul-e-Khumri

Afghanistan

Seek Love …
In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,
In the naked and outcast, seek Love there!
- William Blake

USA

California, USA

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.
Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that
without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
- Quentin Crisp

USA

Thailand

 Being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty.
-  Mother Teresa

USA

 India 

Philippines

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 Burma

On members of the faithful:
They receive the wretched.  They take strangers into their houses. 
They comfort the sad.  They lend to the needy.  They clothe the naked.
They share their bread with the hungry.  They do not turn their face from the poor.
  This is the kind of brotherhood we teach.
Menno Simons (1496 – 1561) Founder of the Mennonites

Hazara man, Afghanistan

Hazaras have long been seen as outsiders in Afghan society,
routinely subject to discrimination, and set apart by both their features and their Shiite religion,
in a land where the majority practice the Sunni faith.

Hazara girl, Afghanistan

Silhouettes and Shadows

Bodh Gaya, India

 The Sun never knew how wonderful it was
until it fell on the wall of a building.
Louis Kahn, Architect
quoted in forward of In Praise of Shadows,  Junichiro Tanizaki

Mud Mosque, Mali

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain,
and see even here, upon a winter’s day,
how beautiful the shadows are.
  Alas!  It is the nature of their kind to be so.
The loveliest things in life are but shadows,
and they come and go, and change and fade away…
- Charles Dickens

Cambodia

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows,
the light and dark which that thing provides.
- Junichiro Tanizaki

Kabul, Afghanistan

We are but dust and shadow.
- Horace

Preah Khan, Cambodia

You can only come to the morning through the shadows.
- J.R. R. Tolkien

Thailand

Burma/Myanmar

Mauritania

Brazil

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
- T. S. Eliot

Italy

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow.
The shadow is what we think of it.  The tree is the real thing.
- Abraham Lincoln

New York

Kandze, Tibet

Burma/Myanmar

Kabul, Afghanistan

China

Kashmir

Korea

Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan

Ancient Catacombs, Rome, Italy

A shadow on the wall
boughs stirred by the noonday wind
that’s enough earth
and for the eye
enough celestial participation.
- Gottfried Benn
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

It Takes Two

 Here are some pictures of couples all over
the world who have a relationship that is
evident in their gestures of caring, their body
language, their eyes.

Mauritania

If we are a metaphor of the universe,
the human couple is the metaphor par excellence,
the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.
The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
– Octavio Paz, Mexico, Nobel Laureate in Literature

Havana, Cuba

Brazil

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Venice, Italy

What is essential is invisible to the eye.
 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Rome, Italy

Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be, the last of life,
for which the first was made.
Our times are in his hand who saith,
A whole I planned, youth shows but half;
Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!
– Robert Browning

France

 

New York City

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan

Life has taught us that love does not
consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward
together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Wind, Sand, and Stars

Tagong, Tibet

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
– Robert Browning

Gostivar, Macedonia

 

Agra, India

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. 
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

Uganda

To love someone deeply gives you strength.
Being loved by someone  deeply gives you courage.
- Lao-Tzu

Sanaa, Yemen

 

Dublin, Ireland

 

Belgrade, Serbia

One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life.
That word is love.
– Sophocles

Rome, Italy

 

Istanbul, Turkey

Cambodia

 

Rome, Italy

The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
– Octavio Paz, Mexico, Nobel Laureate in Literature

The Firmest Friend

 The poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend.
- Lord Byron

Johannesburg, South Africa

 

Dogs are our link to paradise.
They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be
back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring.
It was peace.
- Milan Kundera

 

Ireland

 

Kham, Eastern Tibet

 

Varanasi, India

The dog … is the god of frolic.
- Henry Ward Beecher

Angkor, Cambodia

New Delhi, India

 

Kabul, Afghanistan

With eye upraised his master’s look to scan,
The joy, the solace, and the aid of man:
The rich man’s guardian and the poor man’s friend,
The only creature faithful to the end.
- George Crabbe

Porbandar, India

The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.
- Konrad Lorenz

Bagan, Burma

 

Rome, Italy

I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who
returned home after being absent for more than twenty years
and was recognized only by his dog.
- Guillermo C. Infante

Marseille, France

Vietnam

India

 

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have
known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
- James Thurber

Texas, USA

Histories are more full of the examples
of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.
- Alexander Pope

India

Bhutan

Jaipur, India

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers,
is contained in the dog.
Franz Kafka, Investigations of the Dog

Near Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

 

Rome, Italy

California, USA

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in
this selfish world, the one that never deserts him,
the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog.
- George Graham

Paraguay

If you think you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.
-  Cowboy Wisdom

 

Gruffy, our family dog, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania

We invite you to visit our new website:  http://www.stevemccurry.com

Passion of Italy

Rome, Italy 

 

My exhibition in Rome at the Museum of Contemporary Art opened December 3, 2011, and will run through April 29, 2012.   
As part of the exhibition,  I was commissioned to photograph locations all over Italy. 

Here are a few of those pictures:

 

Venice, Italy

 There is no more magnificent absurdity than Venice. To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself,
but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.
- Alexander Herzen

Rome, Italy

Rome, Italy

Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
- Denis Diderot

Sicily, Italy

 

Vatican City, Rome, Italy 

 

When you do things from your soul,
you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
― Rumi

Sicily, Italy 

Rome, Italy

Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
-  Georg Wilhelm

Sicily, Italy

Sicily, Italy

Rome, Italy

Whether you say Gioia di Vivere in Italian, or Joie de Vivre in French, or other expressions which
attempt to capture a passion for life,   you know the difficulty
of expressing the intangible in words.  I hope these pictures reflect the vibrant joy of life in Italy.

Rome, Italy

Rome, Italy

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
― Mark Twain

Rome, Italy

My mind to me a kingdom is,
Such present joys therein I find,
That it excels all other bliss.
-  Sir Edward Dyer

Rome, Italy

Rome, Italy

Rome, Italy

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
- John Keats

Venice, Italy

Nothing in the world that you ever heard of Venice, is equal to the
magnificent and stupendous reality.
- Charles Dickens

Selected Media Coverage

http://www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/art-photo-design/2011/12/steve-mccurry

http://www.video.mediaset.it/video/tg5/tg5_la_lettura/265739/steve-mccurry.html

We invite you to take a look at our new website:

http://www.stevemccurry.com