For the man behind one of the most widely recognised photographs in history, Steve McCurry has kept a low profile. Afghan Girl, taken in 1984, made the cover of National Geographic magazine the following year, and led to McCurry's signing to the Magnum picture agency. It is a simple portrait distinguished by intense colour, the girl's green eyes burning with dignity and despair. It is also, in McCurry's view, far from his best shot.
"It was popular when it first came out," he says. "But the phenomena around it grew over the years. It is a fine picture and it's better to be remembered for one than not at all. You can spend a lifetime shooting thousands of rolls, but the good pictures are few and far between. If Afghan Girl becomes the lead to my obituary – well, hell, I can live with that."
Now 60 and exhibiting his work around the world (a show has just opened in Birmingham), McCurry isn't one for artistic hang-ups. We meet in Paris, where his photographs of Nepalese street children, religious Hindu rituals and Afghan markets, from a portfolio spanning three decades, are showing in two galleries. Predictably, all 45 editions of Afghan Girl have sold out. "They're going to be the last we sell," he says. "There are enough out there."
McCurry quit his job at a Philadelphia newspaper when he was 27. "I was pretty independent. I travelled to India, Pakistan and Nepal." Why? "Why not? I had studied photography and fine art a little in school, but I learned the most about taking pictures in those first two years." Three years after leaving the US, he won the Robert Capa gold medal for his evocative reporting of the Soviet-Afghan conflict in 1980. To cover the war, he had dressed in salwar kameez and turban, smuggling rolls of film across the Afghan border, sewn into his coat. Four years on he found his Afghan girl – Sharbat Gula, a 12-year-old Pashtun, in a Pakistani refugee camp.
He went to India and fell in love with the country, quickly learning to weed out the cliches. "You don't get that raw, original culture anywhere else. But at the same time, just because someone's wearing a turban, doesn't make it an interesting photo." Was he wary of being branded a cultural tourist? "Being a foreigner, people gather round; they become self-conscious around the camera. But I'm inspired by dignity, by human kindness, by people literally living in the gutter who will smile at you with no expectation. That can be New York or New Dehli. I'm not interested in discovering a new tribe – I just observe. The only thing that would worry me is if someone thought I was disrespectful. That, I'd look into."
McCurry makes a curious lunch date. He speaks in ellipses, often leaving sentences hanging, and fiddles apologetically with his BlackBerry. The conversation shifts from the Mujahideen mindset, to his fascination with Buddhism, to his belief that Africa cannot compete with Asia when it comes to multiculturalism. Although his Birmingham show is being billed as a retrospective, he is not keen on the subtitle. "It's a selection of my pictures," he says emphatically. "When I think of a retrospective, I think of an entire career. This is a poem on a slice of my work."
McCurry went digital in 2005, finding it easier to edit and send pictures from the field. He is practical about the benefits and has little patience for the nostalgic romance surrounding photographers who work only with film. "Perhaps old habits are hard to break, but my experience is that the majority of my colleagues, regardless of age, have switched over." Has it made a difference to the work? "The quality has never been better. You can work in extremely low light situations, for example."
And it's true that his photographs are frequently breathtaking. Colour, light and composition work in concert; he has the war photographer's gift for creating dramatic portraits out of everyday scenes, capturing entire stories in a single shot. To do this, he spends nine months of the year travelling, working on magazine commissions.
It helps that he isn't married and doesn't have children. "I don't see [my personal life] as a sacrifice, that's too negative a way to think. But I'll never get to the point where I feel I've done everything. This is something I will do until I drop. So, take a vacation? A vacation from what?"
When he travels, McCurry looks like any other US tourist – khaki trousers, a Nikon swinging from his shoulder, a baseball cap on his head. It's an incongruous outfit for a man who has risked his life on trips to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma and China. "You need to be sharp and you need to be careful, especially now," he says. "You can get killed over and over if you put a foot wrong in Kabul today." He relies on fixers to help him move around and build a rapport with locals."I've never had an ear for languages," he says.
He has twice been reported dead. "It does affect your trust in people," he says, recalling how he put his faith in "this guy in Thailand once. We were in a remote village and he stole all my equipment. He took a train straight back down to Bangkok. Unluckily for him, I took the same one. It was only when we both got off the train that we noticed each other. He went to the police station. I got my stuff back."
Right now, his office in New York is preparing an intriguing project: using one of the last rolls of Kodachrome film in existence, McCurry is venturing into unfamiliar territory, taking portraits of 30 celebrities in their home cities: Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese in New York, Amitabh Bachan in Mumbai. For the first time in his career, McCurry says, he will be setting up shots, choreographing the image. "Even the portraits I've done before, they've never been put together. It's always about waiting, watching, being ready."