Afghan girl

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/23/world/steve-mccurry-afghan-girl-photo/

Getting into Project One of Part Two which is about characterisation. First we get a photo of someone we don’t know and write a little description of the person. Here’s mine.

The girl was about twelve years old. As I walked past she looked over her shoulder, straight at me. Her face was grimy as if it had just finished a dusty, sweaty journey. Her skin beneath the grime was smooth and orange-brown. Burnt umber. Her eyes startled me. Brilliant white with leaf-green, dark rimmed corneas and small pupils. Her hair was jet black so that it was not discernible under the rust coloured cotton headscarf draped loosely over her head and shoulders like the a hood. There were sparse flecks of intense gold in the cotton. Her eyebrows were thick, but flat, black and perfect. The straight, unturned up nose had a flat scar on the left of the bridge, slightly darker and redder, as if some skin had been planed off. The unsmiling lips were slender and slightly pouting in defiance. She was silent and still.

She looked at me with no curiosity for a second or two, then turned away from the sun to face forward. No hurry, nobody to see, nothing to do, nowhere to go. How could such ugliness have happened in the sight of this beautiful child?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s