a picture paints a thousand words... and emotions
Kevin Carter was a photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize (arguably the world's most famous and prestigious award for journalists) in 1994. Published in the New York Times, Carter's photograph was of a young child in the Sudan, who was trying to get to a feeding center. But before she could get there, she collapsed in hunger. A vulture is in the background, waiting for the child to die. This haunting photo came to represent the horror of famine in the Sudan.
Here is the photo: (taken from http://pachacutec.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/%C2%BFde-quien-es-la-culpa/)
Carter's photograph emphasizes the power of the image, and of those who wield it. With this simple photograph, multiple emotions were evoked from those who saw it: horror at the fate of the people in the Sudan; anger at how people can still die of hunger at a time when excess and consumption have become the fashion; awareness of what was happening in the other parts of the world; a need to reach out and help.
The photograph affected the photographer too. Some two months after winning the Pulitzer Prize in May 1994, Kevin Carter committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
From http://iusbpreface.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/scholar-objectivity-imperils-photojournalists/
Witness the shot of a stick-thin, malnourished toddler who stopped to rest on her way to a feeding station in war-torn Sudan. The picture, taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter, shows the girl on her knees, bent at the waist with her forehead resting on the dry, dusty dirt.
She is alone except for a vulture behind her, waiting for her to die.
From www.ofstruijk.nl/Blog/September/september.html
1993. Kevin Carter explores an aid centre in southern Sudan and walks into a wasted busland beyond; a building filled with tiny, famine-stricken children who lay dying on the dirt floor. He had only walked a few metres when he was distracted by a baby's whimper. There, at the side of the dusty road was a small girl trying to drag herself to the clinic. He takes a picture, changes the angle of his lens and notices a dark, ominous shape at the edge of the frame: a vulture eyeing the girl's progress. An image worth more than a thousand words.
The picture made the front page of The New York Times and quickly became the symbol of Sudan's plight, fuelling public outrage over the famine ravaging the country. Donations poured in to African charities -and everyone wanted to talk to the South African snapper about the little girl captured in such a powerful image.
Carter responds he'd chased the vulture away and then sat under a tree and wept. Of the story after that picture was taken, that's the only part he claims to know.
1994. A Pulitzer for Feature Photography to his most hated picture; and finally, four months later, death, at the age of 33.
This picture captivated the world in 1993 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. A few months later, Carter taped a garden hose to the exhaust of his pick-up truck and fed the other end into the passenger side window.
Broke and depressed over the loss of a friend, his suicide note read, in part, “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 . . . “