Afghan Girl Pictures

The first picture of the Afghan Girl was made with a Nikon FM2 that exposed Kodachrome 64 transparency film.  The camera apparatus and film support rooted the picture to a material reality, a recording of a moment in a Pakistani refugee camp in 1984.  The picture was first widely reproduced for the cover of National Geographic Magazine in June 1985.  It has since seen may iterations.
A consideration of photographic reproductions must begin with the most reproduced text on the subject.  In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin notes that, “to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”  But what is the status of a photographic reproduction in the age of digital distribution?  The picture of the Afghan Girl certainly has an analog provenance, but its “aura” and status as iconic image is now reliant on the distribution of jpegs. 
A digital picture is a copy that has no visible original.  This concept can be broadly applied across the digital media and perhaps most acutely realized among the highly reproduced, ubiquitous pictures that are deemed iconic – with the Afghan Girl as a prime example.  In linguistic terms, the iconic picture is a sign that has severed ties to a referent.  The subject of the Afghan Girl is lost.
One can apprehend this loss in the circumstances surrounding the Afghan Girl photograph and its author.  In 2001, photographer Steve McCurry returned to Pakistan to find the subject of his iconic photograph.  His search ended with a subject positively identified as Sharbat Gula[1]. Her identity was confirmed by digital imaging technology that matched the iris patterns of Sharbat Gula with the eyes in the earlier portrait.
The search for the Afghan Girl required the self-confirming evidence of a photograph to provide a record of what lay behind the burqa[2].  A new picture was called upon to function as an index of the previous picture. In his search for the Afghan Girl, I imagine that McCurry arrived at a crisis of authorship; one where the anonymous subject needed to be recovered.
In 2002, National Geographic produced, Search for the Afghan Girl, a documentary that chronicled McCurry’s search for Sharbat Gula. In one photograph, I display the emptied contents of a VHS copy of the documentary. My Search for the Afghan Girl is a tautological image derived from the vestiges of videotape - material from which a subject cannot be recovered.
Sharbat Gula has little personal agency and few individual rights.  Adult women in fundamentalist Muslim societies are living examples of a mandated iconophobia.  Such restrictions yield a rare prize in the shooting (hunting) program of photojournalism.  Gula has been photographed twice in her life, both times by McCurry.
My project, Afghan Girl Pictures, is indexical.  I engage the Afghan Girl image, not as a singular photograph, but as a text.  My project makes no claim to unify an index with its concrete subject, Sharbat Gula.  As a referent she has been lost to the programmatic aspect of photography.  In Image, Music, Text, Roland Barthes explains that the text is a process to be demonstrated.  “The text,” he asserts, “is experienced only in the activity of production (158).” I consider my project a productive engagement with the Afghan Girl text.
In his recent book, Art Power, Boris Groys evokes Barthes in suggesting that the contemporary digital picture must be played.  He writes: “A digital image, to be seen should not be merely exhibited but staged, performed (85).”  While I make few distinctions between digital and analog images, each picture I stage becomes a component in a hyper-textual system that holds the potential for infinite expansion.  To decode the Afghan Girl image is to be drawn into an endless process, since every level of decoding reveals another one waiting to be decoded – an unfolding into multiple narratives on orientalism, suffering, beauty, subjectivity, geo-political events, and most fundamentally, the determinism of an artist and her ability to construct an index.
1 Posthumous searches for the subjects of iconic photographs are not uncommon. The identity of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother was reported in 1978 by a Modesto, California journalist.
2 As an adult, Sharbat Gula is required to be fully covered under the chadri in public. This policy is broadly enforced in the fundamentalist Muslim rural provinces of Afghanistan and Pakistan where the search for the Afghan Girl took place.