Steve McCurry. Immersion

Following Joel Meyerowitz, Polka dedicates the second edition of Immersion to Steve McCurry. At the crossroads of photographic exhibition and film, this original project invites visitors into a photographer's world to better understand his work. For behind the images that have travelled the world lie a gaze, a method and a demanding rigour. And a certain idea of photography.

In September 2026, Adélie de Ipanema, director of Polka, and producer-director Florent Lacaze spent three days in Pennsylvania with Steve McCurry. They followed him in his everyday life, at the heart of his working world, at his home and even onto the streets of Philadelphia, to capture as closely as possible what feeds his gaze and shapes his photographic voice.

Four fifteen-minute films take us behind the scenes of Steve McCurry's body of work. From his studio, where photographs are selected and assembled to compose a book or an exhibition, to his vast archive space of nearly one thousand square metres, they reveal the photographer's working methods, his relationship to images and the rigour that guides each of his choices.

Slides, prints, publications and travel souvenirs tell the story of a life devoted to travelling the world and photographing it. In Philadelphia, the camera follows him through the streets. Steve McCurry observes, waits and sometimes gives up. He only takes a picture once a bond forms with his subject, a reminder that for him, photography is above all a matter of encounter.

On the walls of Polka, the prints resonate with the films screened simultaneously on screens nearby. The images take on another dimension in the light of these sequences filmed up close to the photographer. The visitor thus discovers at once a body of work, its construction and the gaze that carries it.

The route traverses the territories that nourished his work, from India, his country of the heart, to Pakistan and the United States. From Taj and Train, made in 1983, to the portrait of Sharbat Gula, the young Afghan woman with green eyes who became the Mona Lisa of photography, the coherence of his work is revealed: the power of colour, the precision of composition and the intensity of faces.