Photography means more than that.

A competent photographer, born in Philadelphia (1950) has wandered all over the world, looking for what he calls, the “unexpected, the moment of serendipity.” Although he had dreams of becoming a documentary filmmaker, he had joined a newspaper later on, as a proficient photographer.
Steve McCurry's journey inaugurated when he crossed the Pakistan border into Afghanistan and snapped photos of the civil exertion before the Russians raided. He has covered wars from Cambodia to Iran-Iraq to the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia. The traveling has taken him to Angkor Wat, Yemen, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Bombay. He has even rushed his way to the World Trade Center back in September 11th to capture photos of the chaos. Those motion pictures won him many winning awards.
Most of his work echoes that ethic, even if it’s a photo of an abandoned dog attempting to stay arid as floodwater rise in India, or a badly injured tolerant in Afghanistan. His - sometimes agonizing, sometimes blissful photographs are always poetic and evocative.
“If you wait, people would forget your camera and the soul would drift up into view,” McCurry once said.

Kabul, Afhanistan, 1992

I think what McCurry is trying to emphasize is the fact that even in Afghanistan, deludes and youngsters were meant to be born to battle war for their lives; their country and their community - as if it's a tradition. The petite boy clutching onto the firearm, bigger than the boy himself, looks willing. There's no way of knowing if he knows what he's actually doing or if he knows what he's going to be. All these different emotions hide behind the back of his appearance. As if he’s wearing a mask of no expressions. This photo holds a big meaning towards it. A little boy, with a big gun and a large hand on boy’s head gives you an idea about the security in Afghanistan; and how they all need to enhance it. The use of child soilders is a global problem specifically most critical in Africa, and Asia, but armed groups in the America, Euroasian, and the Middle East also uses children as soilders. All nations must work together with international organizations and nongovernmental organizations to take urgent action to disarm, demobolize, and reintergrate child soilders. Although, with these child soilders that are used, are for their own country's sake and to help and protect one another. When these child soilders grow up with full knowledge of war, maybe they will successfully protect their family and community. After all, families and the place you belong to are one of the most important things you could possible have in your life. Our lives, our countries, our communities are first to priority.

In a photographic sense, McCurry's photographs are very professional and filled with contrast. Meanwhile, the photographs are meaningful too, obvious or not. The best thing about the photography is the contrast and balance of the colours, not to mention the simple - yet meaningful, message that goes with it as a package. One of the thing that makes the photo last and filled with endurement is probably the fact that the photo can mean variety of different things - it could hold infinity of meanings, or maybe just one or two. All his work mirrors his journey because the variety of his photos resembles different culture/conflict/etc. that each people are facing through, weather it's poverty, war, or anything at all. "Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." — Dwight D. Eisenhower