Kevin Carter (1961-1994) was a South African photojournalist.
Carter spent much of his career covering the unstable situation in the last stages of the South African Apartheid regime. He is best known for winning the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for a haunting photograph from the Sudan famine crisis of a small, starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. However, he did not only get praise for the picture. Heavy criticism was directed at him for just photographing - and not helping - the 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. [1]
This criticism and the death of a close friend may have contributed to Carter's suicide at the age of 33. His suicide note read:
- I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen... The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.
Welsh band Manic Street Preachers recorded a song about him on their 1996 album Everything Must Go.
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Last updated: 08-01-2005 10:52:37
