Her face was known to billions, printed on magazine covers and hung in galleries, and for 17 years she had no idea. This episode reconstructs the life of Sharbat Gula, the young girl with piercing green eyes photographed by Steve McCurry in 1984 and published on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985. We begin in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, where Soviet bombing of her village when she was about six forced her family to walk across the Hindu Kush to the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan. There, in an informal tent school, McCurry made his portrait on Kodachrome 64 with a Nikon FM2 and a 105mm lens, a slow, deliberate process that required a 12-year-old to sit perfectly still.

We examine the critique that the image humanized refugees while erasing the identity of the person in it, since her name was never recorded. Then we foll ...