Through the Lens of Steve McCurry

As my interest in thread painting older faces developed, I found some wonderful portraits photographed by Steve McCurry who was a freelance photographer for National Geographic. I wrote to his studio and was granted permission to use his photographs as a starting point as long as I referenced Steve in my work. At the same time my interest in using teabags as a substrate within my work was developing and it seemed a good match to place the images in a teabag substrate stamped with a camera and having the images surrounding an image of Steve with his camera. All the teabags were salvaged from use dried and attached to a background of cotton with the teabags being attached with gel medium and a layer of gel medium over the top. The background took on an aged leather look. I called this quilt “Through the lens of Steve McCurry. Below is a close up of the individual images including some that were not used in the finished quilt.

Over the years I have learnt a lot from Steve’s photographs both in composition and of creating the ordinary/mundane into photographic work of art.