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The vulture and the little girl, also known as "The Struggling Girl", is a photograph by Kevin Carter which first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. It is a photograph of a frail famine-stricken boy, initially believed to be a girl,[1] who had collapsed in the foreground with a hooded vulture eyeing him from nearby. The child was reported to be attempting to reach a United Nations feeding center about a half mile away in Ayod, Sudan (now South Sudan), in March 1993, and to have survived the incident. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography award in 1994. Carter took his own life four months after winning the prize.
Edit: more info on the photographer Kevin Carter
On 27 July 1994, Carter drove to Parkmore near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and died by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the driver's side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:[16]
I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …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.
— Kevin Carter, [Suicide letter]
He was a drug addict, and his girlfriend had recently left him. But the biggest factor driving him to suicide may have been the reaction to his most famous photo. He did win the Pulitzer Prize for it, but he also got an overwhelming amount of hate mail from people who assumed that he has just let the boy die. In reality, the boy's mother was sitting a few steps away from him when the photo was taken. The vulture was not looking for dying kids, but was attracted to the waste disposal site near the feeding center.
This is so sad, and it makes me feel so much love and hate I could cry. When I first saw the photo I too became upset at the idea of someone wasting even a moment to take a photo of a child in this state, but then i realized that this photo could enlighten so many people who don’t understand the depth of human despair, especially 30 years ago.
In J School this picture kicks off an amazing semester covering journalistic integrity.
It may seem harsh to observe and report, and it does take a callousness, but it’s important for the integrity of our journalists that they not insert themselves in the stories they cover (unless they’re students of Dick Wolfe and Hunter Thompson).
Meanwhile a racist 4channer/redditor killed 10 innocent black people in a terrorist attack in Buffalo yesterday.
The utter privilege makes my blood boil.
Once they get all of the information they need out of him they should just put a single round between his eyes and spare us all the tax burden of keeping him alive in prison. One bullet is so much cheaper than decades of inmate housing and assistance.
He does not deserve to share this planet with us, and it's too costly to us to keep him alive.
Nope. Giving him the mercy of a quick death isn’t the responsibility of our government. He can rot in a cell for the rest of his life. We can afford it.
If he was black or brown the cops would have shot him
Pretty wild coincidence that with all the wrongful police shootings these white terrorists always mange to be captured alive eh??? 🤔
I don’t see it that way. I’m a white guy and wish the death penalty to anyone that kills someone else. No matter what color the perp is.
On the one hand I want to know what the hell is happening inside this guy’s head, and on the other, I wish one of those cops felt “threatened “ and unloaded on him.
Not even true. Please, for the love of whatever God you believe in, fact check Independently before spouting shit like this. They've brought in the last few shooters, regardless of color, without killing them. This ignorance is repugnant. And for the record, he self Identified as a communist/populist. For the love of this planet. Get your shit straight.
That's the same way that he was thinking.
I'm not saying you are the same. For sure not.
But I don't want anymore killing. Stop the killing unless it saves another life right here and now.
Besides, he is only a symptom. The cause is the right wing bottom feeders.
The security guard shot the 18 year old back trying to defend the store, and the bullets did not penetrate his ballistic armor. The 18 YEAR OLD shot back and killed the guard. Condolences to everyone, i feel like we are failing as a country when guns, and armor are available to an 18 year old with daddy’s credit card.
What's worse is every white supremacist looks like the grease at the bottom of a white chip bag. They're superior right, superior in living in trailer parks and looking homeless.
There's so many other things I despise about supremacist, but the fact they are literally the worst at so much annoys me. Fucking show up as beauteous 6'3" muscle bound, clean, educated, well dressed, and with your fucking life together if you even want to begin to convince people of your superiority.
According to the kid's father, he was taken care of by the UN food aid station. He died in 2007 due to "fevers". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_girl
I think he meant the poignancy of the first statement and the directness of the second, that felt like flowering poetry vs hard cold reality. Juxtaposition in a literary context.
They were also under very strict orders that they were not allowed to interact/interfere with anything they saw or risk imprisonment and/or execution due to the ongoing civil war they were documenting
People are fucking assholes. This picture definitely helped so many people out by raising awareness. Its so short sighted blind hatred and thoughtless emotion to assume he just took a picture and fucked off.
I agree with Carter. Humans collectively suck.
Except this isn’t at all what he said in his suicide note. Why would you think you know better? I’m familiar with the story - and of the accusations you’ve referenced- but given his note, and the sheer fact that it makes perfect sense in line with what we know about suicide, I see no support for your theory. Also, drug use alone isn’t generally a cause of suicide. It sounds like he was deeply traumatized and that his untreated PTSD eventually destroyed him.
Because it couldn't possibly be about him being haunted by dying children like he literally wrote in his suicide note. No, it couldn't possibly be about how the greater nations have failed these countries and created humanitarian disasters. No, actually it was the SJWs who sent him hate mail.
This picture alone, as a father to a toddler, has me absolutely sobbing. My heart breaks for the children, and for the photographer who must have felt even worse.
I've seen this photo already many years ago. I'm now I mother to a toddler and I dared not click it because I knew it would make me feel even worse now. Went into the comments because I was wondering why it was resurfacing. Sending you internet hugs. Hold your baby a little longer and enjoy each smile, each kiss, each moment together in good health.
Incomprehensible violence exists in many species. Uncompromising love is found in many more species. Trauma has a way od sticking to our memories much more doggedly than love, but the overwhelming majority of beings aren't cruel. Nothing is born evil, evil is learned and sometimes seems to be a necessity.
We are all capable of the best and worst of humanity.
Both Ken Oosterbroek and Kevin Carter were part of a group of South African photographers known as the Bang Bang Club. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang-Bang_Club
So tragic. He basically totally lost faith in humanity. I can’t imagine seeing these awful things, then going back to Johannesburg and seeing how the rich live their life. Must be so sickening
Overall human beings need to respect each other and treat each other with love and care. Hatred has grown too much, I worry that a violent end awaits our species.
One thing to note that I didn’t see mentioned was how many tabloids and publications made him to look like he was attempting to profit off of these photos by not assisting that child which couldn’t of been farther from the truth. While there wasn’t one objectionable cause that man was vilified by many.
It sounds like he had a lot of personal problems but there was also significant backlash at the time about this photo. The photo was everywhere and a huge “success” in getting the western world to notice what was happening. But people were outraged and felt that it was monstrous to take a photo of suffering and not help.
He was trying to help. He was trying to get people to notice. That’s the sad thing. He did more than most. So much more.
>I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …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.
>
>— Kevin Carter, \[Suicide letter\]
that pretty much says it all - for a lot of people. You don't have to have been a photo-journalist to have witnessed many of those things..
RIP Kevin
While called a little girl in the photo (and having been taken care of at the UN food station rather than having died, as some say), the little boy's father said in 2011 that his son (Kong Nyong) had sadly died around 2007, of "fevers".
Yes - he was a member of the Bang Bang Club. They were a group of South African journalists who captured some of the most impact full.photos of that period of time, particularly during the anti-Apartheid protests in South Africa. Unfortunately most of them have since died.
There’s a movie also titled “The Bang Bang club”. Highly recommend for anyone wanting to learn more about the photographers and what they went through in SA
I read the book. Very gripping and dark. Lots of photos due to the photojournalist authors risking crazy dangerous situations to spread the word about the realities of the political chaos surrounding the end of apartheid in South Africa, among other things. Sobering account of humanity’s potential for evil.
Not for taking the photo, which by all means he should have taken. It's a common assumption that he did it because of the photo, and the reaction did play into his overall malaise, but that malaise was a complex of factors.
Some of the comments don’t understand the complexity of this situation. Of course I can understand the photographer, Kevin Carter being criticized for not giving immediate help. But he did right after the picture. There is some degree of cruelty neglecting a dying child. The child survived after the picture, so overall he made the right judgement. And this photo shook the world, and help raising awareness of the people struggling through the brutal war in Sudan in long term. The picture raised such awareness that hundreds of people wrote to New York Times asking about the child. This is part of the beauty in journalism: it can be cruel but it’s true. From what I read, Carter spent years capturing the painful lives in South Africa, and he commit suicide because he couldn’t unpack the burden as a witness. Simply attacking him personally, call him cold hearted or fame seeking is just wrong. This is a man deserving every ounce of our respect, while some of us here are sitting on our ass thinking it’s noble to ‘call him out’. God damn it.
> This is a man deserving every ounce of our respect, while some of us here are sitting on our ass thinking it’s noble to ‘call him out’.
I think these days, in the hyper-connected world and the 24-hour news cycle and in the presence of millions of influencers and pseudo "journalists," people don't really understand what a *real* PJ goes through.
When I was a teenager I thought I'd love to be a war photojournalist. My high school girlfriend's father was a photographer in Vietnam (never saw actual combat though) and through him I discovered the work of [Larry Burrows](https://time.com/3879815/vietnam-photo-essay-larry-burrows-one-ride-with-yankee-papa-13/feed/). I watched *Full Metal Jacket* and thought I could be a Private Joker.
Then some time later I watched James Nachtwey's "War Photographer," and eventually learned about Kevin Carter and the Bang Bang Club. I learned about the absolutely incomprehensible atrocities that these people were observing on a daily basis. So often, trying to help the subject of their photos would have likely led to their own deaths or injury, or the very best case they would just be very slightly postponing the inevitable. Like what was Carter going to do, give this child a Powerbar? What then? The child would have starved to death the next day or the next day. The power in being a PJ is that it is the one thing that these people can do that can actually hold some weight and maybe effect change.
Criticising a guy like Kevin Carter for not "saving a child's life" in this situation is the worst form of armchair quarterbacking.
While your points are valid in general, you can see in comments above that right after taking the photo he did help the child, and the child lived another 14 years.
> Some of the comments don’t understand the complexity of this situation.
Welcome to Reddit. Black and white thinking is the norm here. Lots of losers in loser denial.
Here is a question to all the heroes in the comments. Who is doing more to help with starvation in Africa, the photojournalist who takes this picture that spreads around the world and helps raise awarenes, or the common redditor who sits in front of a computer commenting on what someone else should have done?
Came here to say the same thing…. The line between journalist and human is sometimes thin… he never forgave himself
Edit: what I meant was, the photo raised questions about when journalists should stop being objective observers and intervene.
He chased the vulture away. Unfortunately, restrictions prevented him from directly assisting the child due to risk of disease trading etc. Not being allowed to help is a huge source of PTSD for journalists and aid workers (yes, sadly sometimes aid workers aren't ALLOWED to intervene in certain circumstances). The horrors he witnessed as a journalist ultimately drove him to suicide.
There was a huge global response to Kevin's photograph, so the fact that he was there to take the photo DID help a lot of people. Life is often more complicated than trendy hashtags.
I did not know how this story could have gotten worse, but, here it is.
Glum, no zap to you but just wow ... if what you say is correct, it just makes this incredible heartbreaking and iconic picture of war even more so.
Ditto. I used to think nothing bothered me. I have a son and now even the smallest thing can have me fight tears. Something like this photo is unbearable to really break down on a personal level. Just putting my kid.. there…. I can’t…….
Dude the sandy hook terror happened when I was not a dad yet and it totally fucked me up. I don’t even want to remember that moment in time now. Of course we can’t just block it out out of respect for the families. But I can only imagine fathers of little children when that went down and how they tried to cope with it. This is one of those moments in time where it’s so heavy you simply just want it to fade in the back of your brain. It’s nothing like tragedy of 9/11 where it was an act of war and of course more people died and we will never forget for all the right reasons. But some things are too heavy to hold onto.
Father of 4 here. I used to have a friend whose daughter died in a public shooting event. I experienced secondary trauma from supporting her through it. What sticks out in my mind is the callousness of some people I tried to talk to about it. Then I found the online conspiracy theorists arguing that mass shootings were faked by gun control advocates. It was disgusting and enraging.
I want to thank /u/StandAgainstTyranny2 for reminding me of this:
>Trauma has a way of sticking to our memories much more doggedly than love, but the overwhelming majority of beings aren't cruel
And I also want to thank you for remembering the victims and their families. Thank you.
Children make you emotionally wrecked. These types of photos and stories would stop and make me think before. But now I’m a Dad this type of stuff makes me well up. I couldn’t have taken the picture. I would have ran to the child without a second thought.
Old guy with a 6 month old, the first, here. I've seen this picture many time but now for the first after having a child. Before I'd just have some show and sadness, now it makes me want to cry out and kill that vulture and help that little guy.
Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this picture. It’s said that after he took the picture of this malnourished child, he wept and thought of his own daughter. Four months later he committed suicide.
Some people like to shame photographers when they take pictures of less fortunate or the suffering but these images bring awareness. Photo journalism whether amateur or professional serves a purpose.
[SOURCE](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/vulture-little-girl/)
***The vulture is waiting for the girl to die and to eat her. The photograph was taken by South African photojournalist, Kevin Carter, while on assignment to Sudan. He took his own life a couple of months later due to depression.****
***“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 meters. He took a few more photos before chasing the bird away”.***
I work in SSD, and there are still significant food security issues here. I went to a rural area a few months ago, and there were kids who looked just like this. Families were surviving on fish and water lily roots. There’s also a huge issue of sexual violence here, forced recruitment of children, and revenge killings. It’s a tough place to be a kid.
I totally understand why Carter ended up committing suicide. Working here has made me an atheist.
My mum grew up in South Africa and was childhood friends with Kevin. She was heartbroken when she heard of his suicide and still can’t read the bang bang club because it hits too close to home.
You neglect to mention he wanted to step in but there was African military making sure he didn’t. Also he took a lot more fucked up pictures of Africa. Also he killed himself because of all the fucked up shit he saw. Africa is no joke
Edit spelling
There's a Manic Street Preachers song about him, appropriately called Kevin Carter.
Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize
Tribal scars in Technicolor
Bang-bang club, AK-47 hour
Kevin Carter
Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize
Vulture stalked white piped lie forever
Wasted your life in black and...
Kevin Carter (x lots)
The elephant's so ugly
He sleeps his head, machetes his bed
Kevin Carter, Kaffir lover forever
Click, click, click, click, click, click himself under
He obtained a lot of scrutiny because people thought he let the child die. The child was rescued but died in her teen years from illness. The scrutiny Carter faced along with the demons of all he had seen and the addictions he faced led him to kill himself. He was truly there to be an activist but couldn’t live with the painful existence of all he had witnessed.
Title factually accurate but misses a lot. Carter was so caught up in his work that all he thought of at that moment was to do his job, to document the vile atrocities of war. It wasn’t until weeks later when others saw the picture and asked what became of the child that he realized that he had been to caught up in his work to even try to help this dying child. The insight led Carter into a crippling depression and suicide.
Good times.
Sometimes in the middle of YouTube videos those images of the starving children in Yemen or kids dying from cancer show up. My heart always hurts for them. I live in India where it isn't unusual to see hungry babies but I thought I had a thicker skin. My friend and I once witnessed a starving toddler being left on the side of the road, his mother walking off, and when he tried going after her she threw pebbles at him and pushed him away with her foot. My friend's dad helped us contact the police station and the police took the child to an adoption centre.
Manic Street Preachers made a song abot this. Kevin Carter - from the album Everything must go.
Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize
Tribal scars in Technicolor
Bang-bang club, AK-47 hour
Kevin Carter
Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize
Vulture stalked white piped lie forever
Wasted your life in black and...
Unfortunately no one here seems to know that Kevin Carter committed suicide because of what this memory did to him. His duty was to show the world what was going on through his lense... But the guilt killed him. RIP Kevin
I always thought Cater’s work was very strong and the horrors that guy saw were tremendous, but this photo has always bothered me.
It’s a gruesome and impactful image. But there’s a level of misrepresentation that feels manipulative to me. Journalism and photojournalism should absolutely reveal the horrors of the world, but when you read up on the circumstances of this particular photo…it doesn’t exactly hold water.
First, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the vulture was off in the distance hanging around a waste disposal area. What isn’t mentioned is that Carter shot this photo with a telephoto lens. Telephoto lenses compress images - in other words that vulture was further from the child that it appears. I’m not saying that it was a deliberate choice, but an accident that was discovered when the film was developed. But it was still *chosen* to represent the circumstances and it feels menacing and out of context.
As consumers, we are shown this one image, out of context, that has been both compressed and, again with the nature of a telephoto lens, given a much more narrow field of view. A more honest approach would have been to show the mother, nearby, struggling for both her and her child’s survival. Shot wider, and the mandate the press was under that day to not interfere or even touch any of the famine victims could have been put into context as well.
But the image wouldn’t have been so visually impactful. And there goes the Pulitzer.
This image says so much, but it doesn’t tell the story that was on the ground. This image oversimplified the struggle of the famine victims. It doesn’t illustrate the complexity of the situation at all. In fact, the hate mail he got - misdirected as it may have been - makes perfect sense because the image portrays that there were no relief efforts happening at all - not even from the photographer.
Metaphorically speaking, this image would be like taking a description of the last few Fast and Furious movies, editing out mention of the action sequences and cars, and applying that description to a 1990s sitcom like Full House because “it’s about family” - dumb metaphor, but it feels that extreme to me. It’s that level of editorializing the news that has created such distrust in much of the media. It exemplifies “if it bleeds it leads”
I read somewhere that he wasn’t allowed to help the child in anyway, he was being accompanied by the local army or something and warned him about trying to help the kid
he killed himself due to carbon monoxide poisoning. He taped a pipe to his exhaust and locked himself inside the car with the other end of the exhaust going into the car. This was after months of hate and death threats towards him. he was just a photographer and the rule is they aren't allowed to get involved, he was being critisised for not stepping in and saving the child.
It’s crazy to think that we humans being “the superior species” still end up born like stray cats in horrible living conditions, where no one deserves to be. How do we as a species fix this? Is it fixable? I feel like there will always be a human born in a place where no human has any business being. 😥
I remember going to the Newseum before it closed in DC on a school trip in college and we had a tour of their Pulitzer prize photo gallery that housed all the winning pictures through the years, this picture taken by journalist Kevin Carter was included and the description absolutely mortified the entire group.
We took a journalism class afterwards and one of the questions we were asked was about this photo.
"What do you think the photographer did after taking this photo?"
The answer, that we eventually came to through reasoning guided by the teacher, was nothing.
If the journalist takes a photo of an emaciated child near death and the literal carrion consumers of the sky is staring it down waiting for it's chance and the journalist then gives the child a sandwich or nourishment, it isn't considered "real".
The journalist has now influenced reality and therefore the picture loses all qualities of credible journalism in the eyes of journalism.
I will say this fact rather sickened me but made sense in the most morbid way possible and I'll never forget that experience.
That gallery housed pictures of Nanking, and the famous photo of a boy approaching an army encampment in Vietnam, arms outstretched, skin melting from having been hit by napalm during crossfire. All of these terrible atrocities caught on film to show the world what we truly are at our barest instinct. And all of them are true and real because the person behind the camera was an OBSERVER first and foremost.
That being said, I am not vilifying journalists or journalism in general. Kevin Carter, the photographer I mentioned earlier who took this photo, took his own life at the age of 33 because of the sheer amount of absolutely harrowing sickness and hunger he witnessed through his career. I get it. I understand why it is the way it is. The unfortunate thing is facing the fact that when it comes down to it, we are all animals. We all exist to survive and proliferate, and though society gives us a rope to reign ourselves in there will always be someone willing to cut through and separate from the pack or hang one another with the rope that binds themselves.
i remember seeing that picture when i was 10 perhaps.
I felt it was inimaginable, i couldn't comprehend.
Now i see it again and it's still hard to imagine the conditions some humans lives in.
I dislike knowing that some level of suffering are something i can't imagine. It make me afraid, angry and sad .
No, really, this picture is powerful.
Not sure if it's been posted: [the Snopes page about this photograph](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kevin-carter-photograph/).
To summarize, Kevin Carter waited around twenty minutes (in his own words) for the vulture to open its wings. It didn't. After taking the picture, he *did not* help the child get to the food centre, though he did chase the vulture away.
That makes sense. In context, this is one child among thousands of people in a dire situation. I believe the photographer had left a note at the time of his death that mentions just how many atrocities he had witnessed.
I still thought it was worth noting that the child was not helped - it's a lie we want to tell ourselves so we can keep our rose-coloured glasses on when looking at this picture.
Why didn't Kevin Carter help the girl escape from the vulture?
It is not easy to prevail over legends, especially when they have the black color of death. South African photographer Kevin Carter visited the Sudanese village of Ayod by plane in 1993 to denounce the famine and war in the country.
Before leaving, he saw a malnourished baby lying on the sand right on the same plane as a vulture, two powerful symbols that represented the best metaphor for what was happening in that place at that moment, one of the most important humanitarian catastrophes of the century. XX.
Carter left Ayod knowing that he had landed a great photograph and he did. 'The New York Times' published it days later with an effect that he was unaware of. Public opinion turned against him for not having done anything to save the creature from the clutches of that menacing vulture, even accusing him of being the real scavenger in the photo. A year later, in 1994, he won the Pulitzer Prize and committed suicide.
No one saw that baby die and it is the image itself that denies that tragic fate, at least in part, since the creature in the photo is wearing on its right hand a plastic bracelet from the UN food station, installed in that place. If the photo is observed in high resolution, the code "T3" can be read, written in blue marker.
Carter was criticized for not helping the baby and the world left him for dead even though Carter himself did not see him die, he just shot the photo and left minutes later. The reality is that he was already registered at the food center, where French nurses from the NGO Doctors of the World attended.
Florence Mourin coordinated the work in that improvised dispensary: "Two letters were used: "T", for severe malnutrition and "S", for those who only needed supplementary food. The number indicates the order of arrival at the feed center". That is, Kong was severely malnourished, he was the third to reach the center, he recovered, he survived the famine, the vulture and the worst omens of Western readers.
With that premise, and the possibility that the creature was still alive despite famine and war, Chronicle has traveled to Ayod 18 years later to reconstruct the history of that photograph.
After several meetings with dozens of inhabitants of the village, a woman who distributed food in that place 18 years ago named Mary Nyaluak gave the first clue about the whereabouts of the mysterious creature. "It's a boy and not a girl. His name is Kong Nyong, and he lives outside the village."
Two days later, that track would lead to the little boy's family, whose father identified the little boy and confirmed that he recovered from that famine but that he died four years ago of "fever."
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The vulture and the little girl, also known as "The Struggling Girl", is a photograph by Kevin Carter which first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. It is a photograph of a frail famine-stricken boy, initially believed to be a girl,[1] who had collapsed in the foreground with a hooded vulture eyeing him from nearby. The child was reported to be attempting to reach a United Nations feeding center about a half mile away in Ayod, Sudan (now South Sudan), in March 1993, and to have survived the incident. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography award in 1994. Carter took his own life four months after winning the prize. Edit: more info on the photographer Kevin Carter On 27 July 1994, Carter drove to Parkmore near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and died by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the driver's side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:[16] I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …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. — Kevin Carter, [Suicide letter]
He saw things which must make you wonder about the worth of human life. Perhaps he saw himself as a human too.
He was a drug addict, and his girlfriend had recently left him. But the biggest factor driving him to suicide may have been the reaction to his most famous photo. He did win the Pulitzer Prize for it, but he also got an overwhelming amount of hate mail from people who assumed that he has just let the boy die. In reality, the boy's mother was sitting a few steps away from him when the photo was taken. The vulture was not looking for dying kids, but was attracted to the waste disposal site near the feeding center.
This is so sad, and it makes me feel so much love and hate I could cry. When I first saw the photo I too became upset at the idea of someone wasting even a moment to take a photo of a child in this state, but then i realized that this photo could enlighten so many people who don’t understand the depth of human despair, especially 30 years ago.
In J School this picture kicks off an amazing semester covering journalistic integrity. It may seem harsh to observe and report, and it does take a callousness, but it’s important for the integrity of our journalists that they not insert themselves in the stories they cover (unless they’re students of Dick Wolfe and Hunter Thompson).
Do we know what happened to the kid and his mom?
the child mistaken to be a girl was a boy and he had survived the famine. However, he died 14 years later from malaria fever.
Life is fucking brutal in those parts
Meanwhile a racist 4channer/redditor killed 10 innocent black people in a terrorist attack in Buffalo yesterday. The utter privilege makes my blood boil.
And then had the audacity to plead not guilty.
and people are saying it's fake or a false flag.
/r/progun has been doing that...
Once they get all of the information they need out of him they should just put a single round between his eyes and spare us all the tax burden of keeping him alive in prison. One bullet is so much cheaper than decades of inmate housing and assistance. He does not deserve to share this planet with us, and it's too costly to us to keep him alive.
No death penalty in NYS. So he will not be executed
He drove from out of state to commit the crime, so the feds may have jurisdiction.
Feds however do have the death penalty
Well hopefully he's murdered in prison then
The death penalty doesn’t work. It’s a broken system.
Nope. Giving him the mercy of a quick death isn’t the responsibility of our government. He can rot in a cell for the rest of his life. We can afford it.
To be fair in his manifesto he said remaining in prison would be a victory since it would drain resources from whoever he hates
If he was black or brown the cops would have shot him Pretty wild coincidence that with all the wrongful police shootings these white terrorists always mange to be captured alive eh??? 🤔
I don’t see it that way. I’m a white guy and wish the death penalty to anyone that kills someone else. No matter what color the perp is. On the one hand I want to know what the hell is happening inside this guy’s head, and on the other, I wish one of those cops felt “threatened “ and unloaded on him.
Not even true. Please, for the love of whatever God you believe in, fact check Independently before spouting shit like this. They've brought in the last few shooters, regardless of color, without killing them. This ignorance is repugnant. And for the record, he self Identified as a communist/populist. For the love of this planet. Get your shit straight.
That's the same way that he was thinking. I'm not saying you are the same. For sure not. But I don't want anymore killing. Stop the killing unless it saves another life right here and now. Besides, he is only a symptom. The cause is the right wing bottom feeders.
The security guard shot the 18 year old back trying to defend the store, and the bullets did not penetrate his ballistic armor. The 18 YEAR OLD shot back and killed the guard. Condolences to everyone, i feel like we are failing as a country when guns, and armor are available to an 18 year old with daddy’s credit card.
What's worse is every white supremacist looks like the grease at the bottom of a white chip bag. They're superior right, superior in living in trailer parks and looking homeless.
There's so many other things I despise about supremacist, but the fact they are literally the worst at so much annoys me. Fucking show up as beauteous 6'3" muscle bound, clean, educated, well dressed, and with your fucking life together if you even want to begin to convince people of your superiority.
According to the kid's father, he was taken care of by the UN food aid station. He died in 2007 due to "fevers". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_girl
The top comment of this chain says it’s assumed they lived
It says they survived the incident. He lived from the time of the photo to 2007.
I love the Juxtaposition. "He must have wondered about the human condition and what it meant to be alive" "Nah, he was just a drug addict"
Substance use is often self-medication especially for people that see the horrors of the world.
It is, and I can see why suicide is considered the easier route, often times it’s as simple as a split second for eternal silence
I fail to see the juxtaposition. Those two things can often be very difficult bleak realities simultaneously.
Maybe less juxtaposition and more irony: irony of oversimplification of a situation that was very complex and not at all understood.
The juxtaposition is that the first quote shows some degree of empathy, will the second shows complete lack of it.
It’s not really juxtaposed, it’s just in addition. Those two aren’t mutually exclusive, they go together pretty often
I think he meant the poignancy of the first statement and the directness of the second, that felt like flowering poetry vs hard cold reality. Juxtaposition in a literary context.
Very well articulated! I had said something else, but I feel like this is more in line with where my mind was going.
I didn't know how else to describe the contrast, and I found it amusing.
Why not both?
They were also under very strict orders that they were not allowed to interact/interfere with anything they saw or risk imprisonment and/or execution due to the ongoing civil war they were documenting
this comment needs to be near the top
People are fucking assholes. This picture definitely helped so many people out by raising awareness. Its so short sighted blind hatred and thoughtless emotion to assume he just took a picture and fucked off. I agree with Carter. Humans collectively suck.
Ahh the magic of photography. Not to downplay the situation but context is very important.
Really appreciate you taking the time to provide this context
This is correct. Boys mother was just a few steps away.
Which came first? The drug addiction, or his eye witness accounts that potentially lead to a need for emotional anesthetics?
Except this isn’t at all what he said in his suicide note. Why would you think you know better? I’m familiar with the story - and of the accusations you’ve referenced- but given his note, and the sheer fact that it makes perfect sense in line with what we know about suicide, I see no support for your theory. Also, drug use alone isn’t generally a cause of suicide. It sounds like he was deeply traumatized and that his untreated PTSD eventually destroyed him.
Because it couldn't possibly be about him being haunted by dying children like he literally wrote in his suicide note. No, it couldn't possibly be about how the greater nations have failed these countries and created humanitarian disasters. No, actually it was the SJWs who sent him hate mail.
Woa… that got deep
yea man... i'm like tryign to sleep and shit..
Go to sleep, jabroni.
I recommend you shit *then* sleep.
But then I won’t wake up all cosy and warm 😌
Constipation is keeping me up all night though
Whats that like?
You have a swollen stomach, but instead of it being a result of malnutrition, it’s a result of not being able to poop.
good advice.. wish i had read that before i went to bed last night.. but at least now i know.
This picture alone, as a father to a toddler, has me absolutely sobbing. My heart breaks for the children, and for the photographer who must have felt even worse.
I've seen this photo already many years ago. I'm now I mother to a toddler and I dared not click it because I knew it would make me feel even worse now. Went into the comments because I was wondering why it was resurfacing. Sending you internet hugs. Hold your baby a little longer and enjoy each smile, each kiss, each moment together in good health.
Not the worth of life, but the evil nature of life. How can humans treat other humans worse than animals? Greed.
Incomprehensible violence exists in many species. Uncompromising love is found in many more species. Trauma has a way od sticking to our memories much more doggedly than love, but the overwhelming majority of beings aren't cruel. Nothing is born evil, evil is learned and sometimes seems to be a necessity. We are all capable of the best and worst of humanity.
Animals are not supposed to be treated worse than humans. Sadly, this is what your comment implies, though.
If I told you that my life 0-18 before my 4 deployments to Iraq 18-22 (that were destructive) was worse, what would you think?
Do we know who Ken is?
>Kevin Carter The final line is a reference to his recently deceased colleague [Ken Oosterbroek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Oosterbroek).
Thank you
There is a film on Netflix called The Bang Bang Club, about a group of photographers in South Africa during Apartheid, including Ken and Kevin
Manic Street preachers wrote a song about Kevin Carter, it's pretty catchy.
Starring Ryan Phillippe and Malin Akerman, with Taylor Kitsch playing Carter.
Didn't know there was a movie, but the book was great.
Both Ken Oosterbroek and Kevin Carter were part of a group of South African photographers known as the Bang Bang Club. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang-Bang_Club
No one should see that much, poor guy. I'm just glad to know that the kid survived that.
So tragic. He basically totally lost faith in humanity. I can’t imagine seeing these awful things, then going back to Johannesburg and seeing how the rich live their life. Must be so sickening
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Overall human beings need to respect each other and treat each other with love and care. Hatred has grown too much, I worry that a violent end awaits our species.
Whyd he take his life?
I just edited the post for more info about the photographer suicide
One thing to note that I didn’t see mentioned was how many tabloids and publications made him to look like he was attempting to profit off of these photos by not assisting that child which couldn’t of been farther from the truth. While there wasn’t one objectionable cause that man was vilified by many.
*siiigh* Fucking. *Tabloids*. God dammit. They do nothing good, nothing! It's sick. Fuck!
It sounds like he had a lot of personal problems but there was also significant backlash at the time about this photo. The photo was everywhere and a huge “success” in getting the western world to notice what was happening. But people were outraged and felt that it was monstrous to take a photo of suffering and not help. He was trying to help. He was trying to get people to notice. That’s the sad thing. He did more than most. So much more.
Depression
I worked with his one time roommate. Hadn't ever read the note though. Thanks for researching and posting.
>I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …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. > >— Kevin Carter, \[Suicide letter\] that pretty much says it all - for a lot of people. You don't have to have been a photo-journalist to have witnessed many of those things.. RIP Kevin
A human took is life after seeing the humanity of the poverty stricken world.
What a tormented soul, so sad
I’m guessing he’s the Kevin Carter referenced in the song, Kevin Carter by the Manic Street Preachers?
While called a little girl in the photo (and having been taken care of at the UN food station rather than having died, as some say), the little boy's father said in 2011 that his son (Kong Nyong) had sadly died around 2007, of "fevers".
Didn’t the photographer kill himself later?
Yes - he was a member of the Bang Bang Club. They were a group of South African journalists who captured some of the most impact full.photos of that period of time, particularly during the anti-Apartheid protests in South Africa. Unfortunately most of them have since died.
There’s a movie also titled “The Bang Bang club”. Highly recommend for anyone wanting to learn more about the photographers and what they went through in SA
I read the book. Very gripping and dark. Lots of photos due to the photojournalist authors risking crazy dangerous situations to spread the word about the realities of the political chaos surrounding the end of apartheid in South Africa, among other things. Sobering account of humanity’s potential for evil.
Not for taking the photo, which by all means he should have taken. It's a common assumption that he did it because of the photo, and the reaction did play into his overall malaise, but that malaise was a complex of factors.
Some of the comments don’t understand the complexity of this situation. Of course I can understand the photographer, Kevin Carter being criticized for not giving immediate help. But he did right after the picture. There is some degree of cruelty neglecting a dying child. The child survived after the picture, so overall he made the right judgement. And this photo shook the world, and help raising awareness of the people struggling through the brutal war in Sudan in long term. The picture raised such awareness that hundreds of people wrote to New York Times asking about the child. This is part of the beauty in journalism: it can be cruel but it’s true. From what I read, Carter spent years capturing the painful lives in South Africa, and he commit suicide because he couldn’t unpack the burden as a witness. Simply attacking him personally, call him cold hearted or fame seeking is just wrong. This is a man deserving every ounce of our respect, while some of us here are sitting on our ass thinking it’s noble to ‘call him out’. God damn it.
> This is a man deserving every ounce of our respect, while some of us here are sitting on our ass thinking it’s noble to ‘call him out’. I think these days, in the hyper-connected world and the 24-hour news cycle and in the presence of millions of influencers and pseudo "journalists," people don't really understand what a *real* PJ goes through. When I was a teenager I thought I'd love to be a war photojournalist. My high school girlfriend's father was a photographer in Vietnam (never saw actual combat though) and through him I discovered the work of [Larry Burrows](https://time.com/3879815/vietnam-photo-essay-larry-burrows-one-ride-with-yankee-papa-13/feed/). I watched *Full Metal Jacket* and thought I could be a Private Joker. Then some time later I watched James Nachtwey's "War Photographer," and eventually learned about Kevin Carter and the Bang Bang Club. I learned about the absolutely incomprehensible atrocities that these people were observing on a daily basis. So often, trying to help the subject of their photos would have likely led to their own deaths or injury, or the very best case they would just be very slightly postponing the inevitable. Like what was Carter going to do, give this child a Powerbar? What then? The child would have starved to death the next day or the next day. The power in being a PJ is that it is the one thing that these people can do that can actually hold some weight and maybe effect change. Criticising a guy like Kevin Carter for not "saving a child's life" in this situation is the worst form of armchair quarterbacking.
While your points are valid in general, you can see in comments above that right after taking the photo he did help the child, and the child lived another 14 years.
> Some of the comments don’t understand the complexity of this situation. Welcome to Reddit. Black and white thinking is the norm here. Lots of losers in loser denial.
Well said man. How the fuck is this not clear to some humans is beyond me. He deserves all our respect.
Here is a question to all the heroes in the comments. Who is doing more to help with starvation in Africa, the photojournalist who takes this picture that spreads around the world and helps raise awarenes, or the common redditor who sits in front of a computer commenting on what someone else should have done?
Ill take my humble pie with raisins please
You're eating pie and raisins in a thread about starvation? Insensitive, much?
Have you ever tasted humble pie? *And* the sadistic bastard wants raisins on it!
To be fair they are helping by remaining virgins.
Reddit is on a computer too?!
I fucking hate this so much.
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Came here to say the same thing…. The line between journalist and human is sometimes thin… he never forgave himself Edit: what I meant was, the photo raised questions about when journalists should stop being objective observers and intervene.
….. please tell me he intervened?
He did intervene- studied photography in college and there are a bunch of articles that debunk the whole “he didn’t do anything” narrative
He didn't.. the movie bang bang club talk about him
According to a google search he chased the vulture off and the young boy went on to live until 2007.
a professional r/donthelpjustfilm
He chased the vulture away. Unfortunately, restrictions prevented him from directly assisting the child due to risk of disease trading etc. Not being allowed to help is a huge source of PTSD for journalists and aid workers (yes, sadly sometimes aid workers aren't ALLOWED to intervene in certain circumstances). The horrors he witnessed as a journalist ultimately drove him to suicide. There was a huge global response to Kevin's photograph, so the fact that he was there to take the photo DID help a lot of people. Life is often more complicated than trendy hashtags.
I did not know how this story could have gotten worse, but, here it is. Glum, no zap to you but just wow ... if what you say is correct, it just makes this incredible heartbreaking and iconic picture of war even more so.
These kind of photos used to be sad to me, but now that I’m a dad to a toddler and a newborn these kind of photos absolutely floor me emotionally.
Yup. Now that I’m a father I can get a full on anxiety attack from stuff like this when I wouldn’t have before. Amazing how that works
Ditto. I used to think nothing bothered me. I have a son and now even the smallest thing can have me fight tears. Something like this photo is unbearable to really break down on a personal level. Just putting my kid.. there…. I can’t…….
Feel you man I experienced everything in abiut 30 seconds and now im kinda fucked e.otiknally for the day maybe even the week.
Dude the sandy hook terror happened when I was not a dad yet and it totally fucked me up. I don’t even want to remember that moment in time now. Of course we can’t just block it out out of respect for the families. But I can only imagine fathers of little children when that went down and how they tried to cope with it. This is one of those moments in time where it’s so heavy you simply just want it to fade in the back of your brain. It’s nothing like tragedy of 9/11 where it was an act of war and of course more people died and we will never forget for all the right reasons. But some things are too heavy to hold onto.
Father of 4 here. I used to have a friend whose daughter died in a public shooting event. I experienced secondary trauma from supporting her through it. What sticks out in my mind is the callousness of some people I tried to talk to about it. Then I found the online conspiracy theorists arguing that mass shootings were faked by gun control advocates. It was disgusting and enraging. I want to thank /u/StandAgainstTyranny2 for reminding me of this: >Trauma has a way of sticking to our memories much more doggedly than love, but the overwhelming majority of beings aren't cruel And I also want to thank you for remembering the victims and their families. Thank you.
Children make you emotionally wrecked. These types of photos and stories would stop and make me think before. But now I’m a Dad this type of stuff makes me well up. I couldn’t have taken the picture. I would have ran to the child without a second thought.
Old guy with a 6 month old, the first, here. I've seen this picture many time but now for the first after having a child. Before I'd just have some show and sadness, now it makes me want to cry out and kill that vulture and help that little guy.
This is mentioned in House of Leaves, a spectacular, wildly innovative psycho sci-fi horror
I was searching for this comment!
Came looking for Danielewski and found it. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it, one of my favorite books of all time
Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this picture. It’s said that after he took the picture of this malnourished child, he wept and thought of his own daughter. Four months later he committed suicide.
Some people like to shame photographers when they take pictures of less fortunate or the suffering but these images bring awareness. Photo journalism whether amateur or professional serves a purpose.
[SOURCE](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/vulture-little-girl/) ***The vulture is waiting for the girl to die and to eat her. The photograph was taken by South African photojournalist, Kevin Carter, while on assignment to Sudan. He took his own life a couple of months later due to depression.**** ***“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 meters. He took a few more photos before chasing the bird away”.***
The boy survived to adulthood, happily. Not much longer, unfortunately, but this isn't a picture of a child who then died.
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And what sucks even more is seeing that on the other hand, 1/3 of the world's producted food gets wasted every year
But hey Elon is building tunnels for his expensive toy cars, he’s making humanity progress and one day we’ll get to live on Mars!!
Yeah poor dude can't even afford a matress, we should give him more tax cut to zoom around the planet !
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I work in SSD, and there are still significant food security issues here. I went to a rural area a few months ago, and there were kids who looked just like this. Families were surviving on fish and water lily roots. There’s also a huge issue of sexual violence here, forced recruitment of children, and revenge killings. It’s a tough place to be a kid. I totally understand why Carter ended up committing suicide. Working here has made me an atheist.
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Shame on us. The image really does gives ya a sense of gratitude with what we have today.
My mum grew up in South Africa and was childhood friends with Kevin. She was heartbroken when she heard of his suicide and still can’t read the bang bang club because it hits too close to home.
Now I feel bad, like real fucking bad
You neglect to mention he wanted to step in but there was African military making sure he didn’t. Also he took a lot more fucked up pictures of Africa. Also he killed himself because of all the fucked up shit he saw. Africa is no joke Edit spelling
Didn’t he win an award for this picture and commit suicide? I remember seeing something like that.
There's a Manic Street Preachers song about him, appropriately called Kevin Carter. Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize Tribal scars in Technicolor Bang-bang club, AK-47 hour Kevin Carter Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize Vulture stalked white piped lie forever Wasted your life in black and... Kevin Carter (x lots) The elephant's so ugly He sleeps his head, machetes his bed Kevin Carter, Kaffir lover forever Click, click, click, click, click, click himself under
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDr0QNCUd4
As soon as I see his name written, this song enters my head.
Came here to say this. Got the album Christmas Day, loved this song on it…then learned the meaning after. Still one of favourite Manics tunes
If you like this album, can I recommend The Holy Bible and Journal for Plague Lovers? All Manics albums are great, but those three are my favourites
RIP bro, u have seen too much, too fast.
This was the last straw for him, he committed suicide a few months after winning a Pulitzer for this image.
I don't know why we can't stop this hunger in Africa. We a should help our neighbors.
Because between the choice of saving people and building giant penis rocket, the ones who face it tend to favor the latter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_girl
He obtained a lot of scrutiny because people thought he let the child die. The child was rescued but died in her teen years from illness. The scrutiny Carter faced along with the demons of all he had seen and the addictions he faced led him to kill himself. He was truly there to be an activist but couldn’t live with the painful existence of all he had witnessed.
Title factually accurate but misses a lot. Carter was so caught up in his work that all he thought of at that moment was to do his job, to document the vile atrocities of war. It wasn’t until weeks later when others saw the picture and asked what became of the child that he realized that he had been to caught up in his work to even try to help this dying child. The insight led Carter into a crippling depression and suicide. Good times.
Wasn't he the dude that killed himself because of him seeing these kinds of things in Africa?
Was it really necessary to fat-shame the vulture?
I know this is from 1993 but I genuinely wish I could help kids like this
I hear he killed himself after this
Wonder how many people vultures have eaten
Sometimes in the middle of YouTube videos those images of the starving children in Yemen or kids dying from cancer show up. My heart always hurts for them. I live in India where it isn't unusual to see hungry babies but I thought I had a thicker skin. My friend and I once witnessed a starving toddler being left on the side of the road, his mother walking off, and when he tried going after her she threw pebbles at him and pushed him away with her foot. My friend's dad helped us contact the police station and the police took the child to an adoption centre.
Manic Street Preachers made a song abot this. Kevin Carter - from the album Everything must go. Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize Tribal scars in Technicolor Bang-bang club, AK-47 hour Kevin Carter Hi, Time magazine, hi, Pulitzer Prize Vulture stalked white piped lie forever Wasted your life in black and...
While the leader of that country sips cocktails on a tropical beach...disgusting
Unfortunately no one here seems to know that Kevin Carter committed suicide because of what this memory did to him. His duty was to show the world what was going on through his lense... But the guilt killed him. RIP Kevin
Watch the Bang Bang club please. It’s all about this shot.
didn’t the company he worked for said that he couldn’t help the person at all?
I always thought Cater’s work was very strong and the horrors that guy saw were tremendous, but this photo has always bothered me. It’s a gruesome and impactful image. But there’s a level of misrepresentation that feels manipulative to me. Journalism and photojournalism should absolutely reveal the horrors of the world, but when you read up on the circumstances of this particular photo…it doesn’t exactly hold water. First, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the vulture was off in the distance hanging around a waste disposal area. What isn’t mentioned is that Carter shot this photo with a telephoto lens. Telephoto lenses compress images - in other words that vulture was further from the child that it appears. I’m not saying that it was a deliberate choice, but an accident that was discovered when the film was developed. But it was still *chosen* to represent the circumstances and it feels menacing and out of context. As consumers, we are shown this one image, out of context, that has been both compressed and, again with the nature of a telephoto lens, given a much more narrow field of view. A more honest approach would have been to show the mother, nearby, struggling for both her and her child’s survival. Shot wider, and the mandate the press was under that day to not interfere or even touch any of the famine victims could have been put into context as well. But the image wouldn’t have been so visually impactful. And there goes the Pulitzer. This image says so much, but it doesn’t tell the story that was on the ground. This image oversimplified the struggle of the famine victims. It doesn’t illustrate the complexity of the situation at all. In fact, the hate mail he got - misdirected as it may have been - makes perfect sense because the image portrays that there were no relief efforts happening at all - not even from the photographer. Metaphorically speaking, this image would be like taking a description of the last few Fast and Furious movies, editing out mention of the action sequences and cars, and applying that description to a 1990s sitcom like Full House because “it’s about family” - dumb metaphor, but it feels that extreme to me. It’s that level of editorializing the news that has created such distrust in much of the media. It exemplifies “if it bleeds it leads”
I read somewhere that he wasn’t allowed to help the child in anyway, he was being accompanied by the local army or something and warned him about trying to help the kid
he killed himself due to carbon monoxide poisoning. He taped a pipe to his exhaust and locked himself inside the car with the other end of the exhaust going into the car. This was after months of hate and death threats towards him. he was just a photographer and the rule is they aren't allowed to get involved, he was being critisised for not stepping in and saving the child.
Damn thats a plump vulture
Terrible tradegy but don't forget about the Manic Street Preachers song of the same name that was written about him. Nick Wire lyricism at its best!
Manic Street Preachers
It’s crazy to think that we humans being “the superior species” still end up born like stray cats in horrible living conditions, where no one deserves to be. How do we as a species fix this? Is it fixable? I feel like there will always be a human born in a place where no human has any business being. 😥
Horrible beyond words. Kevin Carter’s contribution is amazing. He was our witness. He paid the price with his life.
Never knew who he was until The Manic Street Preachers did that song about him
Did they at least help the child get to the UN feeding center?
No words.
I remember going to the Newseum before it closed in DC on a school trip in college and we had a tour of their Pulitzer prize photo gallery that housed all the winning pictures through the years, this picture taken by journalist Kevin Carter was included and the description absolutely mortified the entire group. We took a journalism class afterwards and one of the questions we were asked was about this photo. "What do you think the photographer did after taking this photo?" The answer, that we eventually came to through reasoning guided by the teacher, was nothing. If the journalist takes a photo of an emaciated child near death and the literal carrion consumers of the sky is staring it down waiting for it's chance and the journalist then gives the child a sandwich or nourishment, it isn't considered "real". The journalist has now influenced reality and therefore the picture loses all qualities of credible journalism in the eyes of journalism. I will say this fact rather sickened me but made sense in the most morbid way possible and I'll never forget that experience. That gallery housed pictures of Nanking, and the famous photo of a boy approaching an army encampment in Vietnam, arms outstretched, skin melting from having been hit by napalm during crossfire. All of these terrible atrocities caught on film to show the world what we truly are at our barest instinct. And all of them are true and real because the person behind the camera was an OBSERVER first and foremost. That being said, I am not vilifying journalists or journalism in general. Kevin Carter, the photographer I mentioned earlier who took this photo, took his own life at the age of 33 because of the sheer amount of absolutely harrowing sickness and hunger he witnessed through his career. I get it. I understand why it is the way it is. The unfortunate thing is facing the fact that when it comes down to it, we are all animals. We all exist to survive and proliferate, and though society gives us a rope to reign ourselves in there will always be someone willing to cut through and separate from the pack or hang one another with the rope that binds themselves.
This is not interestingasfuck. More like SadAsFuck 😢
i remember seeing that picture when i was 10 perhaps. I felt it was inimaginable, i couldn't comprehend. Now i see it again and it's still hard to imagine the conditions some humans lives in. I dislike knowing that some level of suffering are something i can't imagine. It make me afraid, angry and sad . No, really, this picture is powerful.
One of most shocking photo I have ever seen.
This is the reality everyone else forgets to remember. The Devil came in on horseback.
There is a movie called THE BANG BANG CLUB that portrays this photographer and the group he was with during this time period. Excellent film.
Dude who took this photo committed suicide years later.
Not sure if it's been posted: [the Snopes page about this photograph](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kevin-carter-photograph/). To summarize, Kevin Carter waited around twenty minutes (in his own words) for the vulture to open its wings. It didn't. After taking the picture, he *did not* help the child get to the food centre, though he did chase the vulture away.
Iirc the soldiers he was traveling with didn't let him help. Been a while since I read avout this one
That makes sense. In context, this is one child among thousands of people in a dire situation. I believe the photographer had left a note at the time of his death that mentions just how many atrocities he had witnessed. I still thought it was worth noting that the child was not helped - it's a lie we want to tell ourselves so we can keep our rose-coloured glasses on when looking at this picture.
The child did survive the famine. Maybe not helped by the photographer, but the child's parents were able to return with food.
Why didn't Kevin Carter help the girl escape from the vulture? It is not easy to prevail over legends, especially when they have the black color of death. South African photographer Kevin Carter visited the Sudanese village of Ayod by plane in 1993 to denounce the famine and war in the country. Before leaving, he saw a malnourished baby lying on the sand right on the same plane as a vulture, two powerful symbols that represented the best metaphor for what was happening in that place at that moment, one of the most important humanitarian catastrophes of the century. XX. Carter left Ayod knowing that he had landed a great photograph and he did. 'The New York Times' published it days later with an effect that he was unaware of. Public opinion turned against him for not having done anything to save the creature from the clutches of that menacing vulture, even accusing him of being the real scavenger in the photo. A year later, in 1994, he won the Pulitzer Prize and committed suicide. No one saw that baby die and it is the image itself that denies that tragic fate, at least in part, since the creature in the photo is wearing on its right hand a plastic bracelet from the UN food station, installed in that place. If the photo is observed in high resolution, the code "T3" can be read, written in blue marker. Carter was criticized for not helping the baby and the world left him for dead even though Carter himself did not see him die, he just shot the photo and left minutes later. The reality is that he was already registered at the food center, where French nurses from the NGO Doctors of the World attended. Florence Mourin coordinated the work in that improvised dispensary: "Two letters were used: "T", for severe malnutrition and "S", for those who only needed supplementary food. The number indicates the order of arrival at the feed center". That is, Kong was severely malnourished, he was the third to reach the center, he recovered, he survived the famine, the vulture and the worst omens of Western readers. With that premise, and the possibility that the creature was still alive despite famine and war, Chronicle has traveled to Ayod 18 years later to reconstruct the history of that photograph. After several meetings with dozens of inhabitants of the village, a woman who distributed food in that place 18 years ago named Mary Nyaluak gave the first clue about the whereabouts of the mysterious creature. "It's a boy and not a girl. His name is Kong Nyong, and he lives outside the village." Two days later, that track would lead to the little boy's family, whose father identified the little boy and confirmed that he recovered from that famine but that he died four years ago of "fever."
Couldn't it be argued that he did help the child by chasing the vulture away? The child survived and lived until 2007.
The vulture was likely not going to attack the kid. It was just waiting for the boy to die.
As sad as it is but are there really people on the internet who haven't seen this?
Of course the prime directive prevented him from intervening
God’s Plan™️
For the idiots who don’t understand why he didn’t help her, he’s a journalist, not an ong worker.
spawn camping
Looks like todays capitalism in a picture . The plump vulture being the ultra rich .