Vultures and Pulitzers

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Remember this picture? It is world-famous. The vulture awaits for the young girl to die of hunger so it could eat her. The picture was made by South African photographer Kevin Carter while he was in the Sudan. A few months later he committed suicide due to heavy depression.

In March 1993, Carter was sent to the Sudan to report. Near a small village in South Sudan he came across a little girl who had stopped by the road to have some rest on her way to the nearby UN aid center. While she was taking a breath, a vulture landed nearby, waiting.

The photographer waited for 20 minutes until the bird would approach. Then he immortalised the horrifying reality. Only then he decided to shoo the bird away. At that moment he hardly realised he had just made one of the most controversial and hotly discussed photos in the history of journalism.

The photo was sold to the New York Times, where it was published in March 1993. Within a single day, hundreds of concerned readers called the editors to learn if the child had survived. This made the newspaper to place a note saying that the girl had managed to gather her strength and walk away, but her fate remained unknown.

Kevin Carter was flooded with questions and criticism. Why hadn't he tried to help the girl, instead of just using her for his professional purposes? This is a question that reporters and photographers often face in such dramatic situations: where is the line they shouldn't cross while reporting, if any line should exist at all? Should they intervene? The Saint Petersburg Times of Florida even went as far as to conclude that the man who had prepared his camera to immortalise the girl's suffering might have been the other predator in the whole picture.

The outcry was even greater not just because the photographer had made a picture instead of driving the vulture off right away, but because he had not done anything to help the child afterwards. As Carter himself later explained, he had left the girl to struggle to the UN aid center on her own without helping her.

To put this in perspective, he was working there at a time when journalists were strictly prohibited from touching the victims of hunger, for fear of spreading contagions. He was well aware that dozens of people would die in the next hour alone at that UN aid center, and the girl was not the only such case. Still, after the incident he often said he regretted not having helped the girl when he could have, even if there wasn't that much he could have done.

One year later, in 1994 Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer for this controversial photography. The further story of the journalist who made this emblematic picture is quite telling about the tough profession of a photo reporter. In fact, his entire career was full of pain and suffering being recorded on his camera. Priorly, he had photographed beheading executions in 80s South Africa, and many more scenes of violence, including shooting squads and other forms of execution. During an interview, he explained how he tried to cope with all that. He said he was trying to think visually; he would focus on the body of the executed, the wounds, the uniform, then move down to the pool of blood in the sand. The face of the dead was grey, and he would try to remain calm - but something inside him would always scream. The real horror would come only later, whenever he would refer to those moments and view those photos again and again. But that is his job, no one said it wouldn't be tough.

Well, in the end Kevin Carter was defeated by the demons of the past. In July 1994 he put an end to his life. He went to a playground in Johannesburg where he had spent his days in his childhood, and he committed suicide. He left the world at 33. In his farewell letter, he wrote that the pain of life had finally defeated all the joy. The faces of all the dead he had recorded, their corpses and eyes full of anger and desperation, the images of all those starving and wounded children, and crazed people holding the trigger, all of that wouldn't give him a minute of rest. Reality is gruesome, and he had a lot of gruesome reality packed up in one place, and he couldn't cope. Hundreds and thousands of journalists face the same every day while doing their job on the field even today - we should keep in mind when we look at their reports and the photos in the newspapers, because there are not only entire stories behind each of them, but also the immense struggle to deal with the pain that those who record them for us, experience on a daily basis.

Comments

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

I remember this case, although I learned about it a couple of years later. It opened up the perennial debate about whether journalists should intervene in events or merely record them.

[garote]

Now here we are, a couple decades later, and everyone has a video camera, and we're debating whether journalists as we knew them exist any more. What a world!

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

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