Photographer suicide after received award for his Photo

 

How Photojournalism Killed Kevin Carter

See the heartbreaking Kevin Carter photos, including that of the vulture and the starving child, that led to him committing suicide at age 33.

                                        Kevin Carter’s most famous photo, The Vulture And The Little Girl.

When this photograph capturing the suffering of the Sudanese famine was published in the New York Times on March 26, 1993, the reader reaction was intense and not all positive. Some people said that Kevin Carter, the photojournalist who took this photo, was inhumane, that he should have dropped his camera to run to the little girl’s aid. The controversy only grew when, a few months later, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the photo. By the end of July 1994, he was dead.

                            Photojournalist Guy Adams took this shot of Carter during township violence; behind him, a man uses a trash can lid as a shield.

Emotional detachment allowed Carter and other photojournalists to witness countless tragedies and continue the job. The world’s intense reactions to the vulture photo appeared to be punishment for this necessary trait. Later, it became painfully clear that he hadn’t been detached at all. He had been deeply and fatally affected by the horrors he had witnessed.

                Photographer Rebecca Hearfield taking a picture of Kevin Carter.

Carter grew up in South Africa during apartheid. He became a photojournalist because he felt he needed to document the sickening treatment not only of blacks by whites but between black ethnic groups as well, like those between Xhosas and Zulus.