Figures in a Wasteland: Mother and Child, Hiroshima, 1945

Originally posted on LIFE:

“Japanese doctors said that those who had been killed by the blast itself died instantly. But presently, according to these doctors, those who had suffered only small burns found their appetite failing, their hair falling out, their gums bleeding. They developed temperatures of 104, vomited blood, and died. . . . Last week the Japanese announced that the count of Hiroshima’s dead had risen to 125,000.” — From “What Ended the War,” LIFE magazine, Sept. 17, 1945

Four months after the American B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, killing roughly 70,000 men, women and children outright and dooming tens of thousands more to either a torturous recovery or a slow death by radiation poisoning, burns or other injuries and afflictions, Alfred Eisenstaedt made this portrait of a Japanese mother and her child amid the ruins of the city.

Beyond the eternal debate

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Eye Witness

Originally posted on Steve McCurry's Blog:

Eyes speak a universal language, and no
interpreter is needed

India

Where words are restrained, the eyes often talk a great deal.
-Samuel Richardson

Kandahar

These eyes tell the stories of children around the world.
They speak of war, deprivation, and loss.

India

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
- G. K. Chesterton

Tibet

Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.
- Heraclitus of Ephesus, 535 – c. 475 BCE

India

Adriana Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.
-  William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

Actor, Italy

Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes.
 – Tarjei Vesaas, Norwegian Poet

Afghan refugee, Peshawar, Pakistan

Could a greater miracle take place than…

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Family Matters

Originally posted on Steve McCurry's Blog:

Returning family of refugees in their destroyed home in Herat, Afghanistan

In family life, love is the oil that eases friction,
the cement that binds closer together,
and the music that brings harmony.
- Eva Burrows

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.
Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
- Jane Howard

Tibet

Honduras

Australia

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

The family is the nucleus of civilization.
- Will Durant

Burma

The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.  
-  George Santayana

Japan

Mauritania

The family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
- Alex Haley

Peru

India

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you,
but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart,
your mind, your stomach, because 
you do not just live in…

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Life Breath of Half the World

Originally posted on Steve McCurry's Blog:

 India

India’s  monsoon rains have covered the entire country a month ahead of schedule,
brightening the prospects for a
bumper output of summer-sown crops such as rice, oilseeds and
cotton in one of the world’s leading producers.

Mumbai, India

India

During the year I spent following the monsoon in a dozen countries, I learned to see it as a critically important event, 
and not the disaster it had first seemed to my Western eyes.

Varanasi, India

For half the world’s people, good monsoon s  mean life and prosperity.
Bad monsoons mean famine and death.

India

Farmers experience the monsoon as an almost religious experience 
as they watch their fields come backto life after being parched for half the year. 

India

Burma

For months there is no rain, and then there is too much.
Half the world’s people survive at the whim of the monsoon.

Bangladesh 

Rain is grace;
Rain is the sky descending…

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Stolen Childhoods

Originally posted on Steve McCurry's Blog:

India

For the past three decades as I traveled the world on assignment I
 have witnessed children working in fields, factories, ditches, tunnels,
mines, and ship-breaking yards.

Kabul, Afghanistan

The scope of the problem is vast.
Hundreds of millions of children spend their 
childhood working and do not have an opportunity to
play, go to school, or live in a healthy environment.

India

India

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, 
and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty,
you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.
 -  Grace Abbott

Yemen

India

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies is, 
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending…

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Life in Black and White

Originally posted on Steve McCurry's Blog:

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and
tolerant of the weak and strong.
Someday in your life you will have been all of these.
-  George Washington Carver

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together.
- William Shakespeare

The great use of a life is to spend for something that outlasts it.
- William James

May you live every day of your life.
- Jonathan Swift

 

This boy has never held a book in his hands, has never attended school, and has never known
a life without the threat of violence.

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore

 

 

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
- Boris Pasternak

 

I slept…

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The Life of Things

Originally posted on Steve McCurry's Blog:

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
- William Wordsworth,
Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

 

 

 

 

Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something,

or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read.
Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a
band of hikers will make themselves heard.

But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails,
the solid and dependable apples,
this heap of rumpled books,
this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.

These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur.

The brink upon which still life…

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