Portions of Carter’s suicide note read: “I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and 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.
” इस तस्वीर को अवॉर्ड मिलने के बाद भी इसके फोटोग्राफर केविन कार्टर ने आत्महत्या कर ली। अफ्रीका में कुपोषण के शिकार बच्चे के मरने का इंतजार करता एक गिद्ध।
Kevin Carter was an award-winning South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan. He committed suicide at the age of 33. His story is depicted in the 2010 feature film, The Bang-Bang-Club in which he was played by Taylor Kitsch.
Kevin Carter was born in 13 September 1960 Johannesburg, South Africa. Carter grew up in a middle-class, whites-only neighbourhood. As a child, he occasionally saw police raids to arrest blacks who were illegally living in the area. He said later that he questioned how his parents, a Catholic, “liberal” family, could be what he described as ‘lackadaisical’ about fighting against apartheid.After high school, Carter dropped out of his studies to become a pharmacist and was drafted into the Army. To escape from the infantry, he enlisted in the Air Force, which locked him into four years of service. In 1980, he witnessed a black mess-hall waiter being insulted. Carter defended the man, resulting in his being badly beaten by the other servicemen. He then went AWOL, attempting to start a new life as a radio disk-jockey named “David”. This, however, proved more difficult than he had anticipated. Soon after, he decided to serve out the rest of his required military service. After witnessing the Church Street bombing in Pretoria in 1983, he decided to become a news photographer.
Carter had started to work as weekend sports photographer in 1983. 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 “necklacing” by black Africans in South Africa in the mid-1980s. The victim was Maki Skosana, who had been accused of having a relationship with a police officer. Carter 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, while on a trip to Sudan, Carter was preparing to photograph a starving toddler trying to reach a feeding center when a hooded vulture landed nearby. Carter reported taking the picture, because it was his “job title”, and leaving.Sold to the New York Times, the photograph first appeared on 26 March 1993 and was carried in many other newspapers around the world. Hundreds of people contacted the Times to ask the fate of the girl. The paper reported that it was unknown whether she had managed to reach the feeding center. In 1994, the photograph won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.Carter is reported to have waited 20 minutes for the vulture to leave and when it didn’t Carter chased it away and left the scene.
On 27 July 1994 Carter drove his way to the Braamfonte near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life 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, aged 33.
