Steve McCurry. Immersion

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

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

Slides, prints, publications and travel memorabilia tell the story of a life dedicated to travelling the world and photographing it. In Philadelphia, the camera follows him through the streets. Steve McCurry observes, waits, sometimes gives up. It only triggers when a link is made with its subject. A way to remember that, for him, photography is above all a matter of meeting.

On the walls of Polka, the prints resonate with the films broadcast simultaneously on the screens. The images take on another dimension in the light of these sequences filmed as close as possible to the photographer. The visitor thus discovers at the same time a work, its construction and the look that carries it.

The route crosses the territories that have nourished his work, from India, his country of heart, Pakistan, to 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, reveals the coherence of a work: the power of color, the precision of the composition and the intensity of the faces.

Steve McCurry has established itself in the history of photography through its reports, but its work is now part of a broader horizon.

With Immersion, Polka invites you to look at photographs that the whole world thinks you know. A photograph by Steve McCurry doesn’t just tell the story of the world he’s been through. It also tells us something about the way we look at it.