A Life Revealed: National Geographic

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I stumbled across this on digg.com today...  I remember finding the original picture and reading the original story behind it while researching Afghanistan before deploying.
The original photo and story were pretty captivating.

This article is equally captivating... worth a read.

A Life Revealed

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Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.​

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.

The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. "I didn't think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day," he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan's refugees.

The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the "Afghan girl," and for 17 years no one knew her name.

In January a team from National Geographic Television & Film's EXPLORER brought McCurry to Pakistan to search for the girl with green eyes. They showed her picture around Nasir Bagh, the still standing refugee camp near Peshawar where the photograph had been made. A teacher from the school claimed to know her name. A young woman named Alam Bibi was located in a village nearby, but McCurry decided it wasn't her.

No, said a man who got wind of the search. He knew the girl in the picture. They had lived at the camp together as children. She had returned to Afghanistan years ago, he said, and now lived in the mountains near Tora Bora. He would go get her.

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Here is the original story.

Along Afghanistan's War-torn Frontier
National Geographic magazine, June 1985
Published: June 1985

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I WILL NEVER KNOW THIS WOMAN'S NAME. Among Afghan villagers it is the custom for women not to tell their names to strangers. On this cold November night she is busily preparing food for the six mujahidin, Afghan freedom fighters, who have escorted me across the Pakistani border to Afghanistan's embattled Paktia Province and into this small village in the Jaji region.

But in the darkness and snows of December, sometime around the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, she will give birth to her tenth child. If the child comes in the safety of the night, it will be born here, in this earthen house warmed by an iron stove. If her baby comes in the day, she is likely to be in the damp bomb shelter hewn into the ground under the fields outside the village, her birth pangs accompanied, perhaps, by the roar of jets and bombs.

She pauses to pour me a glass of steaming black tea. "When the planes come, I can't run very fast to the bomb shelter any more," she says. "I am too big and heavy. What can I do?" She speaks in a lilting accent, the rhythms of her native Pashtu carrying over into the Dari, or Afghan Persian, that she learned in Kabul before the war.

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That first image is often referred to in professional photographers' circles as "The Perfect Picture."