Everyone knows Steve McCurry for his famous shot of the startled green-eyed Afghan girl that appeared in 1985 on the cover of National Geographic. What luck, people say, to have taken the most recognized photograph in the history of that magazine. But it was, like all incredible images, only partly a question of luck. I knew Steve before he took that picture, and if the shot proves anything it's that in a career of astonishing photography Steve has demonstrated that this was no accident. It is one of his many brilliant shots.

For example, no railway runs near the Taj Mahal. Yet Steve discovered some train tracks and found a way of shooting a picture in which a great drooling steam engine rolled through the foreground with the Taj in the background, a perfectly symmetrical and contrasting pair of images, representing near and far, old and new. It was a much reprinted image, and for years the cover of my Great Railway Bazaar. How had he managed it?

"I found the right spot and kinda waited," he told me.

"How long?" I asked.

"Three weeks."

Seventeen years after the fact, showing the same dedication, he located the Afghan refugee and identified her: Sharbat Gula, now a careworn woman.

The effects of time figure in all his work. So does courage. In the course of doing stories together I have found Steve's stamina, his stomach for the road, for the crowds, for bad weather and for hassles to be much greater than mine; and I don't travel with two tripods and five bags of equipment.

"The only place I could sit was on top of the coach," he once said of a terrible trip through Bangladesh. "There were about fifty other people. It was kind of interesting when we went under bridges."

He has a characteristic laugh, a dry little chuckle, whenever he mentions a hair-raising incident. I have never heard him complain about an assignment, but only express gratitude for the chance of finding an amazing sight or a wonderful person.

I met up with him in Hawaii not long ago, where he was on assignment. In a city of expensive hotels and beachside spas, he was staying at a budget hotel on a busy highway, at the perimeter of the airport. He had no assistant; he was using old-style rolls of film. But his frugality made sense: his subject was Buddhism. Steve has no appetite for luxury.

As the pictures on these pages demonstrate, people in traditional clothes thrill him, and some of the long talks I've had with Steve were laments about the disappearance of distinctive ways of dressing among the peoples of the world. You can see this love for tradition in his pictures--men in turbans, women in saris or robes, ancient jewelry; people at work, nearly always struggling with old tools, the drama of it, the lineaments of a vanishing world. But something special is given to each scene, the McCurry genius for finding heightened color, and there is something old-fashioned if not ancient in this. The pictures here could be showing people centuries ago, their pieties and their clothing unaltered by time.

He seems to have all the time in the world to find these pictures, and yet the morning after arriving in New York from an assignment he saw the World Trade Center in flames, and within minutes--as people were running away--he was running toward the burning buildings. His images of this horror are some of the most memorable I have seen.

Steve is a great photographer because he is a resourceful traveler and a humble person, and absolutely hawkeyed for the way things are, for the color of life, its uplifting luminosity.

For more information on Steve McCurry's photography and on his upcoming workshops, visit stevemccurry.com.