Steve McCurry photographs in the golden hour the way other photographers breathe. Consistently, without apparent effort, as if the alternative had never occurred to him.
This is not a criticism. The golden hour is available to everyone and almost nobody uses it as well as McCurry. The warm, directional light of the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset does specific things to the subjects he is interested in – faces, fabric, the architectural surfaces of South and Southeast Asia – and he has spent four decades understanding exactly what those things are.
Light and the Human Face
McCurry’s central subject is the human face, and the golden hour is the best light for the human face. The reasons are physical. Low-angle directional light creates shadows that define the structure of a face – the cheekbones, the brow, the line of the jaw. It warms skin tones. It catches the light in the eyes in a way that overhead midday light does not.
The photograph that made his reputation – the Afghan girl, Sharbat Gula, made in a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1984 — was not made in golden hour light. It was made in the diffuse shade of a tent interior, which produces a similar quality: soft, directional, wrapping the face rather than hitting it directly. The eyes are the photograph. The light made the eyes possible.
This is the consistent logic across his work. The light he seeks is the light that does something specific to a human face. Sometimes that is golden hour. Sometimes it is open shade. Sometimes it is the light that comes through a doorway in a dark interior. The common factor is direction and quality, not time of day.
Colour and Geography
McCurry works primarily in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, and the light in these geographies behaves differently to European or American light. The latitude is lower, which means the sun rises faster and the golden hour window is shorter. The dust and humidity in the atmosphere scatter the light in ways that produce a warmth and diffusion that higher latitudes do not.
He understands this. The light he is working with in Rajasthan is not the light he would find in the same hour in London or New York. The colour temperature is different. The quality of the shadows is different. The way fabric catches the light — the reds and oranges and yellows of Indian textiles under Rajasthani morning light – is specific to that geography and that atmosphere.
His colour choices as a photographer reflect this. The palette of his work is warm, saturated, specific to the latitudes he works in. This is not post-processing. It is the correct exposure of Kodachrome and later Fuji Velvia in warm, directional, dust-scattered light.
The Window Light Interior
McCurry’s interior work uses a technique as old as painting: the single window as a light source. A woman sitting near a window in a dark room. The light comes from one direction only. The rest of the frame is shadow. The face is lit.
This produces a quality of light – directional, soft-edged, warm where the window faces the sun – that has been used by painters from Vermeer onward for exactly the reasons McCurry uses it. It is the most flattering light for the human face. It is also the most available light in the world. Every building with a window has it.
The technique requires nothing except knowing which side of the room to put the subject on and which direction the window faces. McCurry has applied it in settings from Afghan refugee camps to Indian palaces, and the quality of light is consistent because the physics are consistent.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Go Out
Where will the light be directional at this hour and what will it do to the faces you want to photograph? McCurry’s practice is built on this question. The light is not incidental. It is the first thing he considers.
What does the atmosphere in your geography do to the light? Dust, humidity, pollution, altitude – these all affect colour temperature and diffusion. McCurry’s South Asian light is partly the sun and partly what is between the sun and the ground. What is between the sun and the ground in your city?
Where is the window in this room and which direction does it face? McCurry’s window light interiors are available to anyone with a subject, a room, and a window. The question is whether you know how to use what is already there.
Using BYgo for McCurry Conditions
BYgo tracks the golden hour window precisely – the exact minutes at which the sun is between one and six degrees above the horizon, producing the warm, directional light that McCurry has built his practice on. It also flags the quality of that light based on atmospheric conditions: clear skies produce harder, more directional golden hour light; light haze produces a softer, more diffuse warmth.
If BYgo returns a strong golden hour window with clear or lightly hazy conditions, and you are planning to photograph people, that is McCurry’s working environment. The brief will tell you when the window opens. What you do inside it is yours to decide.
Further Reading
Portraits (1999) is the most direct statement of his practice. In the Shadow of Mountains (2007) collects work across three decades in South and Southeast Asia. Afghanistan (2002) documents the country across twenty years of return visits.
Part of the How They Saw It series – exploring how the photographers in BYgo’s shooting briefs thought about light, time, place, and conditions. Next: Salgado on Geography.