![]() Why else would we think that it was Carter’s duty to carry her to the feeding centre? There would have been a hundred other people crawling around him should he have carried all of them? He could have, but that is besides the point. On some level, this turns the child and the vulture’s tableau into an unfortunate accident. Because we cannot see, and have not seen, beyond that frame, our questions at most extend to the person behind the frame. What do days and days of hunger feel like? We can safely assume that we are unlikely to experience it. But for most, far removed from the scene, that singular question became more important because the horror one felt could be contained to and within that frame. The question of what happened to that child did not haunt him as much as what would happen to all those starving and dying around him. ![]() His close friends and family knew that he was disturbed by the people he saw dying, whether it was in southern Sudan or in South Africa, and that the crouching child in the photograph was not an exception. Carter’s statement - given in an interview following his Pulitzer win - that after taking the photograph he “lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried” was seen as evidence. Of course, it is, but it also is not.Ĭarter won the Pulitzer Prize for the photograph in 1994 and committed suicide three months later. It’s an attitude fuelled by the oft-repeated expression: a picture is worth a thousand words. In fact, for most people growing up in the ’90s, that image came to represent all of Africa, its hunger and the callousness of photojournalists. Southern Sudan’s famine caused by a complex set of factors that involved civil war and floods, followed by drought and disease, became distilled to that one image. St Petersburg Times (Florida) condemned him saying, “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.” Why did he stand around taking pictures instead of helping the child? The questions then turned into accusations. The questions were not limited to the fate of the child but extended to Carter’s ethics. The New York Times, most people turned to Carter, a South African photojournalist, for answers. In 1993, when the image was first published in But these possibilities don’t exist just as possibilities, they become loaded with emotion and turn into haunting questions. ![]() Logically, the composition suggests only two possibilities - either the vulture feasted on the child, which the viewer feels certain was only a matter of time when the photo was taken, or it did not. ![]() Both the child and the vulture are still, but it’s a throbbing stillness, one that makes the viewer desperate for a second frame. Kevin Carter’s iconic photograph of a starving Sudanese girl, who collapsed on her way to a feeding centre while a vulture waited nearby, will always remain controversial because of the unintended suspense it creates. ![]()
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