Another no less strong image is McCurry’s ‘Young Boy Holding Toy Gun To His Head’ taken of Alto Churumazu, in Yanesha, Peru 2004. Here McCurry relates shown in his 2012 Malta exhibition: “I saw the young boy weeping on the side of the road in a village in a mountainous area of Peru. Some of the other children he was playing with where tormenting him. He had a toy gun in his hand, I walked over to see if I could help, but the child wasn’t able to respond because he was so upset. He walked away towards his house”.
Although McCurry’s account does defuse slightly the tension of the image, reducing it to the antics kids usually get up to, again the despair in the eyes of the boy rivets you there and one cannot help but try to read what must have been going on in the boy’s head during that particular moment. This is a masterly capture where the photographer has again managed to quickly and expertly gauge a fleeting situation and grab that instant which again makes the viewer stop and think.
When I first saw this image I was captivated by the boy’s devastating expression with the shock of seeing the gun he is holding to his own head, it made me want to find out more about what was really going on. It was hard for me to imagine that a child that young was in that much anguish that he would choose to kill himself. I was relieved to find out the gun was just a toy, but it still pulled at my heart strings seeing his pain. For me the image made a big impact.
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