Oh, our similarities, binding us across the globe and time whether we know it or not. But knowing would help for the future of our world. This is my grandson (12, taken this summer after not having seen him physically for almost 2 years). It’s one of a series I took at the same time, unintentionally documenting the deep changes that occur in seconds in one face.
But, here is why I’m posting it/writing this: two days ago I showed it to someone who doesn’t know him and barely knows me, and they immediately were taken to a famous photo they couldn’t name but still carried in their memory bank (the eyes, the depth, the intensity). At that moment I saw it, the face of an Afghan girl from 1984 in this Irish, French, Greek, English, Armenian, Scottish, etc., child, part of whose family escaped a genocide, another part famine, and carried on.
The photo is referred to as Afghan Girl, taken by photojournalist Steve McCurry and published on the cover of National Geographic, the most significant and recognized image in the magazine’s history. A student at a tent school in a refugee camp in Pakistan, she is most often described as 12, not that the age matters but I’m just aware of my Cullen and Sharbat, although at the time she was nameless, and one more aspect of this story, our stories.
I’m not here to say that their lives are the same, that her hardship didn’t/doesn’t exist, that my grandson is not living a life that is full of so much possibility and richness. I’m here to say that as much as so many want to be identified by, and to identify, differences, we’re humans with so much tying us all together.
Sharbat lived for years in Pakistan, then was deported back to Afghanistan. She was identified in 2002, putting a target on her back now as a “famous” Afghan female in this new regime, and about a month ago she was evacuated, at her request. She is in Italy, until she isn’t.
Even in these everyday interchanges where someone who knows neither child, someone who is not embedded in causes and actions, someone who is saving toward retirement in a regular job sees deep in their memory bank this connection, there’s hope. Wishing you wellness and wisdom and wonder in our 2022 world of love — or at least some steps toward.
Following is a small segment of one of these series of photos of my grandson (in unaltered order). I can only believe that Sharbat’s other uncaptured images carried something related to these.
