A Too Perfect Picture: Teju Cole's Comparison of Photographers and their Works

An Analysis of Teju Cole’s A Too Perfect Picture
Photography is an art. Like all art, photography is a medium for conveying a message or telling a story. As an artist, a photographer is responsible for the message their photos say. In the article in the New York Times by Teju Cole, he compares two renowned photographers and how their respective works convey different stories. Steve McCurry’s photos instill a fantasy-like illusion while Raghubir Singh’s photos showcase the concrete reality.
In this article, Cole mentioned the vast similarities and the apparent differences between the works of Steve McCurry and Raghubir Singh. Both share the same content as subcontinental terrain where humans are with eye-catching colors. McCurry and Singh both had photos of India which made the comparison almost effortless. This made the differences between the two more obvious.
Teju Cole mentioned the famous photos by Steve McCurry. This includes the June 1985 cover of National Geographic, the Afghan girl with vivid green eyes. This is one of the most eminent photos of the century. Almost everyone has seen this at least once in their life. That is how famous Steve McCurry’s work is.
The National Geographic cover is the epitome of McCurry’s work. Cole described McCurry’s photos to be “stark and direct, with strong colors, a clear emotional appeal, and crisp composition.” That is exactly what the cover was. It is very simple yet striking.
McCurry’s portraits are stunning. His subjects always had something that separates it from a group. His photos “indulge in fantasy”, as Teju Cole puts it. Pale irises, reptiles close to humans are not the typical things one would see in everyday life.
Cole goes on to describe that McCurry’s photos looked staged and far from the candid stills of regular life. He even compared it to the artistic music video of Coldplay’s “Hymn for the Weekend” that he coined looked like a live-action of McCurry’s work. Though this is very interesting, Cole found it boring because it is shaded from reality.
Steve McCurry’s great deal of followers argues that McCurry seeks out and showcases the vanishing cultures. His works show the uniqueness of different cultures. These are the things that need to be documented before it is gone. McCurry showed the world how it would have ...