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August 26, 2005
Kevin Carter's photo
When I dragged myself back from eating my lunch today, having listened to Tony talk about the wonders of grid computing for what seems like a long time, Luke had sent around the Pulitzer prize winning photo of a Sudanese girl snapped around 1994 by Kevin Carter, who later committed suicide.
The vulture appears to be waiting to eat the starving child. According to Wikipedia -- see the link -- the photographer had been "warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease." But contrary to the story Luke sent with the photo, Carter's obituary on the web says the girl, "resumed her trek to the feeding centre. [Carter] chased away the vulture."
After the New York Times published the picture, it garnered Carter the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography:
"I swear I got the most applause of anybody," Carter wrote back to his parents in Johannesburg. "I can't wait to show you the trophy. It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgment of my work I could receive."Carter was feted at some of the most fashionable spots in New York City. Restaurant patrons, overhearing his claim to fame, would come up and ask for his autograph.
It seems that Scott MacLeod, Time's Johannesburg bureau chief, wrote that. Then in the same article, on paragraphs later, we asks, "How could a man who had moved so many people with his work end up a suicide so soon after his great triumph?" MacLeod says it was basically drugs and bleeding heartedness.
Another writer, Charles Paul Freund, sets the context of the picture this way:
Carter, a white South African, spent only a couple of days in Sudan. According to Susan D Moeller, who tells Carter's story in Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, he had gone into the bush seeking relief from the terrible starvation and suffering he was documenting, when he encountered the emaciated girl. When he saw the vulture land, Carter waited quietly, hoping the bird would spread its wings and give him an even more dramatic image. It didn't, and he eventually chased the bird away. The girl gathered her strength and resumed her journey toward a feeding centre. Afterward, writes Moeller, Carter "sat by a tree, talked to God, cried, and thought about his own daughter, Megan."
(Source still http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm)
That Carter one day saw himself in situations like that one, maybe multiple times, "Waiting quietly hoping to get a better shot," could never explain his suicide.
Posted by Mark at August 26, 2005 09:29 PM