Afghan Girl
photograph by Steve McCurry
Afghan Girl is a 1984 photographic portrait of Sharbat Gula, an Afghan refugee in Pakistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. The photograph, taken by American photojournalist Steve McCurry near the Pakistani city of Peshawar, appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic. While the portrait's subject initially remained unknown, she was identified by early 2002: Gula, an ethnic Pashtun from Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province, was a 12-year-old child residing in Pakistan's Nasir Bagh.
In light of the Cold War, the portrait was described as the "First World's Third World Mona Lisa" in reference to the famous 16th-century portrait painting of the same name by Leonardo da Vinci. Gula's image became "emblematic" in some social circles as the "refugee girl/woman located in some distant camp" that was deserving of compassion from the Western viewer, and also as a symbol of Afghanistan to the West. CNN called it the 'world's most famous photograph'.
Cover photo for National Geographic
Sharbat Gula was one of the students in an informal school at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in 1984. Her photograph was taken by National Geographic Society photographer Steve McCurry, on Kodachrome 64 colour slide film, with a Nikon FM2 camera and Nikkor 105mm Ai-S F2.5 lens. The pre-print retouching of the photograph was done by Graphic Art Service, based in Marietta, Georgia. McCurry did not record the name of the person he had photographed.
The public source identifies “Afghan Girl” as photograph by Steve McCurry. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Afghan, Girl and photograph.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19819228. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1985 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Afghan Girl” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.