Eloquence of the Eye

The soul has an interpreter – often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter – in the eye.
- Charlotte Bronte

Sanaa, Yemen

The eyes have one language everywhere.
- Proverb

India

 

Peshawar, Pakistan

The eye is the jewel of the body.
- Henry David Thoreau

Peshawar, Pakistan

Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes.
 - Tarjei Vesaas, Norwegian Poet

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me;
my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
- Meister Eckhart,  1259 – 1327

Girl in Kandahar orphanage, Afghanistan

These eyes tell the stories of children around the world.
They speak of war, deprivation, and loss.

Rajasthan, India

 

Umbria, Italy

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.
-  William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

Rajasthan, India

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rajasthan, India

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
- G. K. Chesterton

Lhasa, Tibet

 

Nuristan Province, Afghanistan

The eyes speak of things we dare not say.

India

 

Bagan, Burma

 

Cambodia

 

Pakistan

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
-Henri Bergson

Niger

The eyes are the most powerful social signalers that we have and hence are
sometimes called the windows of the soul.
- Glen Wilson

India

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 – 43 BCE

Srinagar, Kashmir

Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.
- Heraclitus of Ephesus, 535 – c. 475 BCE

Yangon, Burma

 

United States

 

Lourdes, France

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to
look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
- Henry David Thoreau

Colombia

Eyes have their own universal language, and no
interpreter is needed.

Afghan refugee in Baluchistan, Pakistan

 

Mali

The eyes can do a thousand things that fingers can not.
- Persian Proverb

Afghanistan

Please visit our website:  http://www.stevemccurry.com

Mali

PORTRAITS by Steve McCurry

►

 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id589821521?mt=8

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

===

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

On the Road

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again;
we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
- Jack Kerouac

 

Tanzania

Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
-  Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

 

Umbria, Italy

The road is home.
-  Unknown

 

India

 

India

The way was long and weary,
But gallantly they strode …
Along the heavy road.
- George Robert Sims

 

Kesennuma, Japan

 

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
– Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

 

Tanzania

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

 

Kyoto, Japan

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
-  Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

 

Fiji

If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing

Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.
– Freya Stark, East Is West

 

Karelia, Russia

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say”
-  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

 

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

 

Russia

 

Ethiopia

 

Mali

To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road,
to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Xiahe, Tibet

 

Afghanistan

 

Herat, Afghanistan

Some roads aren’t meant to be travelled alone.
- Proverb

N e w s   a n d   I n f o r m a t i o n
Please visit Chris Beetles Fine Photographs Gallery in London for Steve’s exhibition of  Steve’s images from India.
www.chrisbeetlesfinephotographs.com/

https://twitter.com/McCurryStudios

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

 

Sunrise Sunset

There’s a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they’re absolutely free.
Don’t miss so many of them.
-  Jo Walton

India

 

Yemen

Sunrise and Sunset
I’ll tell you how the sun rose,
A ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.
 The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
That must have been the sun!”
But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while
 Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.
- Emily Dickinson

Morocco

We can only appreciate the miracle of a sunrise if we have waited in the darkness.

Italy

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over
tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the
color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red,
the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Burma

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
-  William Maxwell

India

 

India

From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and
makes us aware that we are nothing,  but the light is all.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

India

How sweet the morning air is!
See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo.
How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of nature.
- Arthur Conan Doyle

Ethiopia

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

New York, United States

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon,
my soul expands in the worship of the creator.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Mumbai, India

Moonlight is sculpture.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Yugoslavia

There is nothing more musical than a sunset.
- Claude Debussy

Thailand

Italy

Thailand

There is only one day left, always starting over:
it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

Italy

 

Mali

 

Burma

 

Nepal

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
- George Washington Carver

Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan

 

Tanzania

 

Honduras

 

Morocco

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
“You owe me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.
- Hāfez, 12th century Persian poet and mystic

India

Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence.
Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
-  Leonora Carrington

Slovenia

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the
remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
But every night come out these envoys of beauty,
and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays

====

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Italy

 

South Africa

 

Kashmir

 

Two by Two

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead.
Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.
- Albert Cam

India

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

Italy

Introducing our Portrait app: 
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/portraits-by-steve-mccurry/id589821521?mt=8

Italy

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and
two minus one equals nothing.
- Mignon McLaughlin

New York, United States

Ethiopia

 

India

Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor.
- Ecclesiastes 4:9 KJV

India

Only a life lived for others is worth living.
- Albert Einstein

Italy

Friendship is born at that moment when
one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I
thought I was the only one.”
- C. S. Lewis

Morocco

No road is long with good company.
- Turkish Proverb

Luoyang, China

Peru

 A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five
people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.
 - Tenneva Jordan

India

Honduras

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the
need for a father’s protection.
- Sigmund Freud

Kashmir

Afghanistan

 

Cambodia

Burma/Myanmar

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
- William Shakespeare

Afghanistan

Italy

Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet.
- Vietnamese Proverb

Tibet

 

Italy

Afghanistan

Tibet

Goa, India

 Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
- Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Kampala, Uganda

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can
sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Macedonia

 

Fiji

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
- Emily Dickinson
=

Steve McCurry:  In the Flow of Time
Photographs from Asia 1980 – 2010
Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg, Germany
Opens January 19, 2013

Steve McCurry’s India
Chris Beetles Fine Photographs
3-5 Swallow Street, London, W1B 4DE
Opens on January 10, 2013

Announcing our new Portraits app:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/portraits-by-steve-mccurry/id589821521?mt=8

Wall to Wall

India

Omo Valley, Ethiopia

Home is any four walls that enclose the right person.
- Helen Rowland

Karelia, Russia

Vietnam

Walls enclose us, exclude us
Keep us in, keep us out
Listen
Watch
Give testimony, bear witness
I was here.

Cambodia

My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!
- Langston Hughes

Celebration at the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany

“There are four kinds of people in the world…
Those who build walls.
Those who protect walls.
Those who breach walls.
And those who tear down walls.
Much of life is discovering who you are.
― P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe

Afghanistan
“OK” indicates that landmines have been cleared

Kamdesh, Afghanistan

One of the most ancient forms of folk art is the handprint, a decorative mark that
I have photographed on walls in many parts of the world. In this house the
wood-panelled walls are covered with a series of roughly applied impressions of family members’ handprints.

Yemen

Walls are the publishers of the poor.
- Eduardo Galeano

Afghanistan

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls …
- Paul Simon

India

Nepal

New York, USA

New York, USA

Every wall is a door.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

China

Chiang Mai, Thailand

…Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t
love a wall …
- Robert Frost

Duomo di Orvieto, Italy

Tibet

A world without walls is the only sustainable world. . . .
If the world is dominated by people who believe that their races,
their religions, their ethnic differences are the most important factors,
then a huge number of people will perish in this century.
- President Bill Clinton

Steve McCurry at the Great Wall of China near Beijing, China

UPCOMING 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

 Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg, Germany – January 19, 2013

 Chris Beetles Gallery, London, U.K. – January 2013

 Kunsthalle Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland - June 1, 2013

Just Write

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Without words, without writing and without books
there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
- Hermann Hesse

Baluchistan, Pakistan

Writing  is one of the grand, free human activities.
-  Thomas E. Cronin

Yemen

Writing is both mask and unveiling.
- E.B. White

Mali

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
- William Wordsworth

Kegalla, Sri Lanka

 Burma

Writing is thinking on paper.
- William Zinsser

 Kabul, Afghanistan

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite…
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Honduras

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
- Jules Renard, Journal, 10 April 1895

India

Like most—maybe all— writers, I learned to write by writing and,
by example, by reading books.
- Francine Prose

Bruce Duffy, writer and author, working on an article for Life Magazine, Afghanistan

The pen is mightier than the sword.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Dith Pran, survivor of Cambodia’s killing fields, photojournalist, and author of
Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors

Paul Theroux, writer and novelist, Costa Rica

Words so innocent and powerless as they are,
as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil
they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Paraguay

Creative writing begins with creative thinking
- K. Earle

Colombia

Afghanistan

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.
- Vita Sackville-West

Thailand

Writing left by visitors to a pilgrimage site in Burma

Peru

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought,
this in turn makes us think more deeply about life … 
- Norbet Platt

Young Sikh boys in classroom, Afghanistan

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain

Fun and Games

China

Brazil

Russia

If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed
himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become
unstable without knowing it.
- Herodotus

Burma

The true object of all human life is play.
Earth is a task garden.
Heaven is a playground.
- G . K. Chesterton

Los Angeles, USA

You must invent your own games and
teach us old ones how to play.
- Nikki Giovanni

Canada

You can discover more about a person in an
hour of play than in a year of conversation.
- Plato

Honduras

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

India

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

Rajasthan, India

 

Burma

Mumbai, India

Play is the exultation of the possible.
- Martin Buber

Australia

A child loves to play not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

- B. Spock, M.D.

Burma

Lebanon

Bangladesh

Play is a uniquely adaptive act,
not subordinate to some other adaptive
act, but with a special function of its own
in human experience.
- Johan Huizinga

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Umbria, Italy

Turkey

India

Elliott Erwitt, Magnum Photographer, in his studio, Central Park West, NYC, USA

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Afghanistan

 For information about our January 2013, Expedition to Burma, please see:
http://stevemccurry.com/expeditions/myanmar-expedition

Feeding Our Hungry World

Part II

Fisherman on Inle Lake, Myanmar/Burma

Afghanistan

The sea’s our field of harvest,
Its scaly tribes our grain;
We’ll reap the teeming waters
As at home they reap the plain.
- John Greenleaf Whittier

Pago, Myanmar/Burma

Barley Fields, Kandze, Tibet

Rice paddies, Tibet

Tawi-Tawi, Philippines

Goa, Western India 

Cultivating Potatoes, Bamiyan, Afghanistan 

Weligama, Sri Lanka

It is estimated that 20% of the world’s population depend upon fish for their survival.

Half of the world depends on rice.

Myanmar/Burma

Sri Lanka 

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous
and the storm terrible,
but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
- Vincent Van Gogh

 

India 

Cambodia 

Japan

Mali 

Philippines 

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the
terrestrial globe.  Its breath is pure and healthy.
It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely,
for he feels life stirring on all sides.
- Jules Verne

Sri Lanka

Dal Lake, Srinigar, Kashmir 

Burma/Myanmar

In 40 years, the global population is expected to swell by
2 billion, so rice, today the fastest growing staple which
feeds more than half the world’s population, will become
increasingly important to global food security.
- Pamela Whitby, BBC, The Race for Rice, 2011

Rice paddy fields, Banaue, Philippines 

Nepal

The first farmer was the first person.
All historic nobility rests on the possession and
use of land.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rice paddies, Thailand

Rice has fed more people over a longer period of time
than has any other crop in human history.
Rice: Then and Now”
by R.E. Huke and E.H. Huke

Java, Indonesia
Woman working in a field devastated by volcanic debris and flood waters

Farmer, Baluchistan, Pakistan

Nepal 

Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall;
who sows a field, or trains a flower,
or plants a tree, is more than all.
- John Greenleaf Whittier

Niger

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.
They are the most vigorous, the most independant, the
most virtuous, and they are tied to their country
and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.
- Thomas Jefferson

Pakistan

Luzon, Philippines

Shibam, Wadi Hadhramaut, Yemen

Afghanistan

Lancaster, Pennsylvania 

The Amish farm as they have for hundreds
of years.  They believe that working with the soil,
raising livestock, and growing their own food is
cooperating with God’s purposes.

The bounty of harvests in Kashmir 

Agra, India

Niger 

The Farmer

Each day I go into the fields

to see what is growing

and what remains to be done.

It is always the same thing: nothing

is growing, everything needs to be done.

Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray

till my bones ache and hands rub

blood-raw with honest labor—

all that grows is the slow

intransigent intensity of need.

I have sown my seed on soil

guaranteed by poverty to fail.

But I don’t complain—except

to passersby who ask me why

I work such barren earth.

They would not understand me

if I stooped to lift a rock

and hold it like a child, or laughed,

or told them it is their poverty

I labor to relieve. For them,

I complain. A farmer of dreams

knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams

knows what it means to be patient.

Each day I go into the fields.
- W.D. Ehrhart

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance
and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

 We invite you to take a look at our redesigned website at:
http://www.stevemccurry.com

 

We appreciate your comments and suggestions! 

 

Sentinels of the Earth

 

The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands,
translated from French by Stuart Gilbert

Chinar Trees, Kashmir

If you would know strength and patience,
welcome the company of trees. 
- Hal Borland

Ayutthaya, Thailand

Cambodia

I hear the wind among the trees
Playing the celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

India

Thailand

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky
- Khalil Gibran

India

Every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of
gold and silver.
- Martin Luther

France

Agra, India

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the
listening heaven. 
- Rabindranath Tagore,
Fireflies, 1928

Cambodia

Trees are much like human beings and
enjoy each other’s company.
- Jens Jensen, Siftings, 1939

Canada

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something,
that quality of air that emanation from old trees,
that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
-  Robert Louis Stevenson

Korea

Niger

I never saw a discontented tree.
They grip the ground as though they liked it, and
though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.
They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind,
going and coming like ourselves,
traveling with us around the
sun two million miles a day,
and through space heaven knows how
fast and far!
-  John Muir

Grand Canyon, Arizona

And see the peaceful trees extend
their myriad leaves in leisured dance
they bear the weight of sky and cloud
upon the fountain of their veins
- Kathleen Raine, Collected Poems

The Sahel

Nepal

  Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing in time to come.
How do we know? They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee that singing will ever be.
- Wendell Berry

Thailand

Cambodia

Believe one who knows
You will find something greater in woods than books.
Trees and stones will teach you
that which you can never learn from masters
- Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)  

Morocco

Cambodia

Dust Storm, Rajasthan, India

A few minutes ago every tree was excited,
bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling,
tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm
like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent,
their songs never cease.
Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life,
every fiber thrilling like  harp strings, while incense is ever flowing
from the balsam bells and leaves.
No wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples…
- John Muir

Italy

Trees, proud standing people
stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying
glorious attention, breathing light.
strength
shelter
timeless confidence
bending and firm
comforting
rooted chorus line
dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds
framing bursts of stars
tender rugged celebration
absorbing and releasing life
each holy branch holding
the power of the Universe.
There.
-  Wallace Stevens