In September 2026, Adélie de Ipanema, director of Polka, and filmmaker-producer Florent Lacaze spent three days in Pennsylvania with Steve McCurry. They followed him in his daily life, at the heart of his working universe, his home and even into the streets of Philadelphia, to capture as closely as possible what feeds 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 one thousand square metres, they reveal the photographer's working methods, his relationship with 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 in the streets. Steve McCurry observes, waits, sometimes gives up. He only releases the shutter when a connection forms with his subject. A way of reminding us that, for him, photography is above all a matter of encounter.
On Polka's walls, the prints resonate with the films shown 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 once a work, its construction and the gaze that carries it.
The route crosses the territories that nourished his work, from India, his heart's country, to Pakistan, and on 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, the coherence of a body of work is revealed: the power of colour, the precision of composition and the intensity of faces.
Steve McCurry established himself in the history of photography through his reportage, but his work today belongs to a broader horizon.
With Immersion, Polka invites us to look differently at photographs that the whole world believes it knows. A photograph by Steve McCurry does not only tell the world he has crossed. It also tells us something about our way of looking at it.