This is a photograph of Sharbat Gula, a young refugee girl I photographed while doing a story on the Afghan Pakistan border. I was walking through a refugee camp one morning outside of Peshawar Pakistan and I heard voices coming from a tent. Those voices turn out to be a girls’ school. I wandered in and I asked the teacher if it’d be okay if I photographed her class and some of the students, and I noticed this one little girl sitting off in the corner with this incredible look, these amazing eyes. I knew right away that this would be an important portrait, that her look really in some ways told the story of Afghanistan because there was a kind of a tragedy, kind of a sadness, which really spoke to the fact that there were more than 3 or 4 million Afghans living in refugee camps in these tents, so I photographed her. I spent maybe only about a minute or two photographing her. She looked into my lens in a very curious way because this was the first time she had ever been photographed. She had the most amazing eyes, and after about a minute or two she got up and ran away because she thought the session was over. It turned out that this was probably the most important photograph of my life. In the last 27 years we have literally gotten thousands of letters of people wanting to send her money, send her clothes, even men wanting to marry her but, the best part of the story is the fact that we’ve been able to help her.
Peshawar, Pakistan, 1984
