A young Shaolin monk runs horizontally across a wall, intense concentration, and perhaps a hint of astonishment, visible in his face. Four other trainees at a martial arts academy near the Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province lounge nonchalantly, seemingly unaware of the gravity-defying action taking place above their heads. Their bright orange robes and Feiyue sneakers stand in contrast to the earthen wall behind them.
The blurred back of a man on the left side of the image highlights the sharp movement at its center. A monk stretching in the background demonstrates his dexterity in a split-like stance.
“There’s this high-level action,” photographer Steve McCurry told CNN of the photo’s composition in a video call from his home in Philadelphia. “And these other boys are just hanging out.”
The image is featured in Magnum’s Square Print Sale, which ends May 5, alongside other photographers’ works. He shot it back in 2004, as part of a personal project, while traveling the world to document various forms of Buddhism. While he doesn’t consider himself to be Buddhist, McCurry has long been interested in the religion and applies some of its principles to his own life.
The Shaolin Temple – which was founded in AD 495 on the slopes of the sacred Mount Song – is said to be the home of Chan Buddhism. Although the religion emphasizes nonviolence, the temple’s warrior monks initially practiced martial arts to defend themselves from bandits. Over time, their rigorous physical training became inexorably linked with their quest to achieve enlightenment.
Today, Shaolin kung fu is widely known, and the monks’ feats in athleticism have been emulated in popular movies. The 1982 movie “The Shaolin Temple,” which launched Jet Li’s career and was filmed on location, was one of the films that brought renewed interest in the monastery. By the time McCurry visited in 2004, dozens of martial arts schools had sprung up on the road leading up to the temple.
“It’s incredible to watch them perform and train,” he said. “You can’t imagine that people can actually do that with their bodies.”
A career on the road
The memorable beginning of McCurry’s journalistic career was his work for the local newspaper after his graduation from the Pennsylvania State University. Subsequent pursuit of a freelance photography led him to travel far and away, taking portraits of people whom he found in what he described to be some of the planet’s most perilous and isolated places.
Finally, in 1979 he crossed the border, Pakistan into the Afgan, right before the invasion of the Soviets. He escaped with some photos of the war by hiding the film in his clothes, so in spite of the destruction that left at least 500,000 dead, millions as refugees, he would give the world the first visual to the conflict.
Nonetheless, his most popular photo was the 1984 “Afghan girl” which featured on the cover of National Geographic magazine’s June 1985 issue showing the capture of a 12- year old-guy-defleaking green eyes.
Across his 50-year career, leading till now, McCurry has deposited photos more than 20 passports. He has eclipsed animals, festivals, worshippers and fighters. Also, he captured conflicts and catastrophes in different locations from Niger to India. In his paintings he masterfully conveyes the antique in the modern, the inquisitive with the routine, and it’s the common ground that does amaze us in the face of a stranger.
In 2016, McCurry made a news headline with his manipulation of the photographs in an exhibition. He claimed that they were done in the studio while he was away on a trip, but the additional images that suggested photomontage fanned a debate on the admissibility of the manipulation in photojournalism.
he declared at the same time, to Time magazine, that he had never been a newspaper, news magazine or news outlet reporter, after losing the jejune job at the newspaper office in the state of Pennsylvania for a brief period. As a freelancer he had done quite a lot: advertising campaigns were included in his refresher courses. He clarified that his work now belongs to the category of fine arts as well, and he is a person who conveys messages with his art.
He added that he understood it could be “confusing … for people who think I’m still a photojournalist,” and that going forward, he would only use Photoshop “in a minimal way, even for my own work taken on personal trips.”
‘Going back again and again’
Before shooting the photograph of the wall-running monk, McCurry had already paid a visit to the Shaolin Temple two decades earlier. He says it was “really empty” during that first trip, and he saw only “bicycles and people in these Mao suits.”
By the time he returned, a kung fu craze had gripped the nation. The area felt more commercial, he recalled. Tens of thousands of (mostly) Chinese boys and men were inspired by a wave of kung fu movies, and were training at the dozens of schools in the area.
The photographer was granted permission at one of the academies and spent a few days with the monks as they went about their daily routine, which included practicing acrobatics on repeat. Some of the boys ate with McCurry at a noodle joint across the street, sharing their hopes to eventually land jobs in security services, performance troupes, as well as the entertainment industry. “They were normal kids,” he said. “But they were very, very dedicated and serious about this practice.”
He captured other photographs of monks’ intense training regimes during his stay, including several hanging upside down by their feet, hands calmly pressed into a prayer pose.
McCurry sought to find the right combination of variables like the subject, angle, light, and background, as the monks perfected their moves. “It’s a (matter) of photographing and going back again and again.”
His perseverance paid off. “It’s a picture that evokes a lot of emotion,” he said of the final shot of the wall-running monk. “It either brings a smile to people’s faces, or they’re kind of in awe of the physicality of these young boys.”
