Kevin Carter

Recently I've become interested in Kevin Carter. I don't know much about Kevin Carter, actually. There's a fair amount written about him online, and I certainly don't feel in a position to add to it informationally. The standard potted biography goes like this: Kevin Carter was born in 1960 in Johannesburg and died in 1994 of carbon monoxide poisoning (suicide rather than accident). He was a photographer. Early in his career he was a member of what become known as "the Bang-Bang Club", a group of photographers who witnessed and recorded the violence of apartheid-era South Africa. He is most famous, however, for a photograph taken in Sudan, of an emaciated girl collapsed upon the ground with a vulture stalking ominously in the backgroud.

This is the photograph for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

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, whereupon 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.

As well as acclaim, however, he also earned criticism. The following quote is from the St. Petersburg Times (of Florida): "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."

At a link that no longer seems to work, I found a comment from a female reader expressing anger at Carter and saying that if it had been her she would have picked the child up there and then, saved her, adopted her and taken her back home, not just gone and sat under a tree and smoked cigarettes and cried, as Carter reportedly did. I also found the following comment, which may have been partly in answer to the one just mentioned (I am no longer sure):

As Kevin Carter's sister, I am sad that Time has stooped to such sensationalist reporting concerning my brother's death. Scott MacLeod did not interview me or my sister or two of Kevin's very close friends. His "detailed digging" resulted in the presentation of a series of negative issues through which he attempted to explain a suicide. Suicide is obviously the result of the negative outweighing the positive, in the victim's mind, but this does not mean that there were not hundreds of positive aspects to the particular individual. Kevin was a person of passion and presence; he left his mark wherever he went. He was an incredible father to Megan and a man who grappled deeply with issues most people just accept. In many ways he was ahead of his time. The pain of his mission to open the eyes of the world to so many of the issues and injustices that tore at his own soul eventually got to him. The year 1993 was a good one for him, but at the end of it he told me he really needed a break from Africa, that it was getting to him. He knew then that he was losing perspective. Unfortunately, the pressure only got worse, with the increased violence leading up to the elections and, worst of all, the loss of his friend Ken Oosterbroek. The Pulitzer Prize certainly didn't send Kevin "deeper into anguish." If anything, it was a confirmation that his work had all been worthwhile. Your version of Kevin's death seems so futile. What is anyone going to learn or gain from reading it?

The situation of photographing the emaciated Sudanese girl caught my imagination. Carter, by this time, was a very experienced photographer. He must have known immediately he saw the vulture the potential impact of the photograph. Apparently he said he waited twenty minutes, to see if the vulture would take wing, so he could catch it in flight. If you are going to lie, why say twenty minutes? Twenty minutes is a long time to wait with a vulture and starving child in front of you. I can't help wondering what must have been going through his mind in those very long twenty minutes. Considering this is someone who got himself beaten up for defending a black man in apartheid South Africa, and who risked his life to record violence on camera, it seems unlikely that his refraining from intervening in the situation for so long could have been the result of simple lack of courage, or simple lack of concern.

And then, there is this information to complicate things further:

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. 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.

Carter's version is more dramatic, but it also makes him look worse. That Silva's account is less dramatic and doesn't make Carter look as bad does not necessarily mean it is closer to the truth. It almost seems as if, in this kind of situation, in this kind of life (Carter's suicide note tells us, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners"), the truth of events, despite the fact that the camera, apparently, never lies, is as hard to grasp as the moral truth, but maybe I'm jumping to conclusions there.