Kevin
Carter (1960-1994)
was an award-winning South African photojournalist. He started to work as sports photographer
but in 1984 he moved on to work for the Johannesburg
Star, bent on exposing the brutality of apartheid.
Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by "necklacing"
in South Africa mid-1980s. He later spoke of
the images; "I was appalled at what they were doing. I
was appalled at what I was doing. But then people
started talking about those pictures... then I felt
that maybe my actions hadn't been at all bad. Being a
witness to something this horrible wasn't necessarily
such a bad thing to do."
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 the food
camp, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. Kevin
Carter later described the incident... 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.
However, Carter came under criticism for just
photographing and not helping the little girl
"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."
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.
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