The Girl With Green Eyes: The Story Behind the World's Most Famous Photograph
For seventeen years, no one knew her name — only her eyes. Then a photographer went looking for a ghost, and found a woman instead.
In 1984, in the dust and canvas of the Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, an American photojournalist named Steve McCurry pointed his Nikon FM2 at a girl attending an informal school for Afghan refugees. She was around twelve years old, a Pashtun from Nangarhar Province. Years earlier, when she was around six, her family had fled their village during the Soviet bombing of Afghanistan, walking across the mountains to Pakistan with her father, brother, and three sisters, eventually settling in the Nasir Bagh camp where she was later photographed. McCurry pressed the shutter on Kodachrome 64 film. He never learned her name.
The image—a young face framed by a tattered red scarf, sea-green eyes locked directly on the lens—appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic. It became, almost instantly, an icon. Critics called it the 'First World's Third World Mona Lisa,' a nod to Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait. CNN would later call it simply the world's most famous photograph. American Photo magazine praised its 'unusual combination of grittiness and glamour.' But behind the fame was an absence: nobody, including the photographer, knew who she was.
McCurry tried repeatedly through the 1990s to find her again, without success. It wasn't until January 2002 that a National Geographic team traveled into Afghanistan on a deliberate search. Learning that the Nasir Bagh camp was about to close, McCurry asked its remaining residents for help. One of them recognized her brother and managed to send word to her hometown. Along the way, the search produced false leads—several women claimed to be the girl in the photograph, and several men mistakenly identified their own wives.
Eventually, the team located her in a remote part of Afghanistan. She was then around thirty years old, and her name was Sharbat Gula. She had left the refugee camp and returned to her native country back in 1992. Her identity was confirmed scientifically, through iris recognition analysis by John Daugman. She remembered the day she was photographed. In her entire life, she had been photographed only three times: once in 1984, and twice more during the 2002 search that reunited her, indirectly, with McCurry. Remarkably, she had never even seen the famous photograph of herself until it was shown to her that year.
Gula was a devout Muslim who ordinarily wore a burqa, and she was hesitant to meet McCurry face to face since he was a man outside her family. After the reunion, National Geographic paid for medical treatment for her family and funded a pilgrimage to Mecca. A 2019 article later revealed that Gula herself had said, in a 2002 interview, that she was angry the photograph had been taken and published without her consent—a reaction rooted, observers noted, in Pashtun cultural norms that discourage a woman from revealing her face or making eye contact with a man outside her family.
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