Picturing the world

Many of the world’s most highly regarded photographers work in near-anonymity. You might not know their faces or even their names, but you’d almost certainly recognize their work.

Steve McCurry is one such photographer. He took one of the world’s most recognized photographs, the green-eyed Afghan girl featured on the cover of National Geographic in 1985.

Famous though his work may be, it’s unlikely that many guests on Silversea Cruises sailings and excursions over the past three years knew he was among them, perhaps seated nearby in a restaurant, joining them on Zodiacs and, on one of his most memorable trips, competing against them during trivia hour.

McCurry and Silversea entered a partnership in 2017 for him to photograph some of the 900-plus destinations the luxury line visits every year, for use in its brochures, on its website and on social media channels. 

McCurry was no stranger to Silversea, having cruised with the line a few times as a lecturer as early as the 1990s. It’s the only cruise line he’s ever sailed on.

But this was his first and only in-depth partnership with a travel provider. 

Although he’s best-known for chronicling strife -— antithetical to a luxury cruise -— Silversea Cruises’ chief marketing officer, Barbara Muckermann, knew that McCurry would offer Silversea photographs that draw out “the soul of the places we visit.” 

“We always say our customers collect people, not monuments, and that’s how we landed on Steve,” she said. “Because there is nobody who can [capture] the amazing uniqueness of the cultures and places we visit like Steve.”

Muckermann and McCurry laughed easily with each other on a Zoom call in October, recalling some of the times they’d spent together over the past few years and excitedly planning the future cruises he’d be taking once cruising can begin again.

Muckermann had long admired McCurry even before a mutual contact of hers and the writer Paul Theroux, one of McCurry’s closest friends, connected them.

He’s since spent 50 days on ships and has also taken two of Silversea’s Couture Collection trips to two landlocked countries, Mongolia and Uganda; he visited mountain gorillas in the latter.

Muckermann said McCurry has full editorial control of his work for the line. 

“The idea is to show the world through the lens of Steve because, as a brand, we feel very close to that vision,” she said. 

McCurry quickly realized that there was an advantage to traveling with Silversea. 

“A lot of the most fascinating parts of the world are only accessible by the sea, by ships, by cruising,” he said, among them the Galapagos, Antarctica and the Arctic. 

“In those places, photographically, the journey was amazing,” he said. “Some of my best pictures were made on the ship as we were moving to another location. Sometimes it was hard -— you were actually out there on the deck all day long because so many things were happening.”

McCurry also found that arriving by sea rather than air gave him a better perspective, referencing a world cruise segment from Shanghai to Hong Kong.

“I love that part of the world and had been to those countries before, but to do it by ship is different,” he said. “Flying at 35,000 feet and coming down and landing at the airport can be boring. Coming in by ship is exciting. You slowly immerse yourself in the geography. The weather and the landscape changes. It’s more like a train — it’s a way to connect with the landscape.”

Despite a career that has taken him all over the world, Silversea ships brought McCurry to many places he’d never been, including the Galapagos (where he went twice with Silversea), Antarctica, the Arctic, Mongolia, Madagascar and Easter Island.

McCurry describes the Antarctica sailing on the Silver Cloud as one of the most memorable, owing to his fellow passengers and the ship’s crew, which he described as “extraordinary.” He said he tried to never miss lectures with the botanists and historians onboard, who were “great storytellers.” To this day he keeps in touch with his trivia team. 

Although McCurry does a lecture on most cruises he’s taken and holds some photography workshops, the cruises he goes on are not advertised as such, so getting onboard with McCurry takes some luck.

Capturing how Silversea sees the world

Muckermann said Silversea has two partnerships that enable guests to “understand places with different lenses.” One is with McCurry; the other is with Adam Sachs, former editor in chief of Saveur magazine and curator of the line’s Sea and Land Taste (SALT) program, which reflects a destination’s traditions through its gastronomy. 

Both McCurry’s photos and the SALT experiences, Muckermann said, are a response to what she calls “a complete shift in the definition of luxury and in what the customers want.”  

The “silent generation” of luxury travelers in the 1990s had experienced wars and the building of walls and “were afraid of going out in the world,” Muckermann said. Cruises were a safe way to travel the world “and bring their lifestyle with them.” The baby boomers, she said, “have a completely different view, and really want to understand the authenticity [within] the places they visit. This is why we felt that Steve, because of his photojournalism background, could be the absolute perfect photographer to portray the world as Silversea sees it.”

Emblematic of how Silversea wants to portray itself, Muckermann said, was that since launching the collaboration with McCurry, “it’s very difficult to find a picture of a ship in any of our communications.”

“We know that our customers are travelers, and they are always looking for the next experience,” she said. “There is no photographer better than Steve to show this shift in what customers want.” 

Perhaps because he’s a boomer himself, McCurry has an appetite for authenticity and adventure. 

One of the highlights of his Silversea experiences was a weeklong trip following the reindeer people of Mongolia. Silversea may be known for offering the height of luxury, but on that particular adventure, McCurry said, “we were living in tents and freezing our asses off.”