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 had started to work as weekend sports photographer in 1983. In 1984 he moved on to work for the Johannesburg Star bent on exposing the brutality of apartheid.

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. 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 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 little 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.


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[edit] Alternative interpretation of the photograph

South African photojournalist Joao Silva, who accompanied Carter to Sudan, gave a different version of events in an interview with Japanese journalist and writer Akio Fujiwara that was published in Fujiwara's book "The boy who became a postcard" (Ehagakini Sareta Shōnen).

According to Silva, they (Carter and Silva) went to Sudan with the United Nations aboard Operation Lifeline Sudan and landed in Southern Sudan on March 11, 1993. The UN told them that they would take off again in 30 minutes, (the time necessary to distribute food), so they ran around looking to take shots. The UN started to distribute corn and the women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. Silva went looking for guerrilla fighters, while Carter strayed no more than a few dozen feet from the plane.

Again according to Silva, Carter was quite shocked as it was the first time that he had seen a famine situation and so he took many shots of the children suffering from famine. Silva also started to take photos of children on the ground as if crying, which were not published. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the girl in the photo taken by Carter. "God was smiling on Kevin." A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos and then the vulture flew off.

Silva stated that he also took similar photos, but didn't win the Pulitzer Prize. "That's just the way things go."


[edit] Death

On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play 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. 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]

Carter died by committing suicide. He was so overwhelmed possibly, by which he encountered and saw. NK.

[edit] In popular culture

  • The Welsh band Manic Street Preachers recorded a song about him on their 1996 album Everything Must Go, as did the band Caliko in their song Jeffrey's Bay on their 2004 album Pictures.
  • There is a song 'Kevin Carter' on the 1996 album of Martin Simpson and Jessica Ruby Simpson, Band of Angels, which is a mainly factual, minimalist, and informative ballad.
  • Poets and Madmen by heavy metal band Savatage is a loose concept-album based around a fictitious investigation of his legacy.
  • Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves has a character very similar to Kevin Carter. The story mentions a photo similar to Carter's Pulitzer Prize-winning image.

[edit] References

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