Kevin Carter

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This article is about the photojournalist. For the song about him, see Kevin Carter (single). For the National Football League player, see Kevin Carter (American football player).

Kevin Carter (September 13, 1960 – July 27, 1994) was an award-winning South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club.

Carter began his career as a weekend sports photographer in 1983 for Johannesburg's Sunday Express. A year later he moved on to work for the Johannesburg Star bent on exposing the brutality of apartheid. That same year Carter's first Time cover appeared.

Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by "necklacing" in South Africa in the mid-1980s. He later spoke of the images; "I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures... then I felt that maybe my actions hadn't been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn't necessarily such a bad thing to do."[1]

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine, Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the girl:

"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." [2]

The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. On April 2, 1994 Nancy Buirski, a foreign New York Times picture editor, phoned Carter to inform him he had won the most coveted prize for photography. Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.

He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and helped the child. Journalists at the time were supposedly warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was accidentally shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. The last person to see Carter alive was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." [3]

[edit] In popular culture

[edit] References

  • There is an art installation called 'the sound of silence' by Alfredo Jaar at Fabrica in Brighton which is based around Kevin Carter. www.fabrica.org.uk
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