[ava]

" PULITZER PRIZE " winning photo taken in 1994 during the Sudan famine.
The picture depicts a famine stricken child crawling towards an United Nations food camp, located a kilometer away.
The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat it. This picture shocked the whole world. No one knows what happened to the child, including the photographer Kevin Carter who left the place as soon as the photograph was taken.
Three months later he committed suicide due to depression.
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 an 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 [2]. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the little girl:

The St. Petersburg Times in Florida said this of Carter: "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."[3]
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 photojournalism. Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.

[edit] Alternative account 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 (絵葉書にされた少年 - Ehagaki ni 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.

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 and corpses and anger and 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."[4]

[ommygod]

get em!

[Shawna]

That is very sad. I hope she made it.

[DonB]

I remember reading that he was haunted that he did nothing to help this child. Serves him right. Put the damn camera away, pick up the girl, and carry her to help.

[enigmawaffles]

Originally Posted by DonB ↗

I remember reading that he was haunted that he did nothing to help this child. Serves him right. Put the damn camera away, pick up the girl, and carry her to help.

If he did that, he'd be there all day! Better to stand back and enjoy the scene from a distance.

[DonB]

Originally Posted by enigmawaffles ↗

If he did that, he'd be there all day! Better to stand back and enjoy the scene from a distance.

Then he should've been there all day if it meant being of some use. He would have gotten much more gratification from that than he did from his Pulitzer.
I realize there's a certain "code" among photographers and other documentarians to "not get involved", but if there's this one famished, immobile child and nothing else around but a hungry buzzard, who wouldn't help her?

[1337_807]

photographers and other documentarians to "not get involved" = retarded. In this situation the not get involve stuff is not applicable. Its your will as a human not a photographer to help that poor child. You got the shot, you have the picture now your work is done as a photographer now your human side's next, help. Damn, why won't some people use common sense? Are all people Homer Simpson now?

[fascinatingimages]

It says a lot about someone if in fact they took that picture, could have helped but didn't.

[zadfrackglutz]

it is wrong to intefere with the natural order of things. "buzzards gotta eat same as worms" quote from the outlaw Josie Whales

[dannielle327]

suicide suits him right for not helping that poor child.karma in action.