“When you experience too much injustice and too much pain"
- Justice
- Oct 9
- 3 min read
The Vulture and the Little Girl — the picture for which he has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
It is the story of a photojournalist who killed himself just within a month of winning the Pulitzer Prize. But why? We will find out.
Photo of Kevin Carter. Source: Lightrocket
Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography award for this picture in 1994. But only four weeks after receiving the award, he commits suicide.
It is March 1993, and The New York Times publishes this picture of a girl in the foreground with a vulture eying her from nearby.
It was only later revealed that he was a boy, not a girl, as initially believed. But this photo had long before become talk of the town.
And hence, that picture is still called the Vulture and the Little Girl.
This photo was shot in 1993, in Sudan. The country was going through a deadly famine, which would kill tens of thousands of people and leave many more homeless.
The child that Kevin Carter photographed was reportedly on his way to reaching a United Nations feeding center, which was about half a mile away from where he had collapsed.
He shot many more atrocities of the war and injustice in general.
Why do a job that is neither well appraised nor very pleasant to do? Because he wanted to bring forward the truth that we Never see, nor never consider it.
He grew up in an all-white neighborhood in Johannesburg and often saw black people being arrested by the police.
Later on in his life, he witnessed the Church Street Bombing of 1983 in Pretoria, in which 19 people were killed and 217 injured. That was the turnaround moment in his life. He then decided to pursue a career in news photography.
He was also a member of the Bang Bang Club. It was a group of four conflict photographers: Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbrock and João Silva.
They were active during an unstable period when South Africa was transitioning from the apartheid system to democracy and it was a bloodbath all around.
The name “The Bang Bang Club” was born out of an article published in the South African magazine Living.
It was active from 1990 to 1994. They filmed many mind-wrenching and dystopian photos together. But it showed the world the reality.
The horror of war.
Of famine.
Of instability.
Of injustice.
Of violence.
Of suffering.
Of death.
Witnessing all this took a toll on his mental health.
He knew what he was doing was mentally exhausting, but he wanted to make his contribution by making the world aware of the horrors of Injustice.
He lived in some of the poorest countries for all his life. But his work reached far and wide. It drew some criticism, but it was a testament to the fact that people were seeing the truth through his photos, and maybe more often than not, some people didn’t want to know the truth.
Enough was enough
A few days after his Pulitzer was announced in April, Kevin Carter was nearby when one of his closest friends and a Bang Bang Club member, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead while photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township.
His job sometimes depressed him deeply. But this was just too much
“Kevin always carried around the horror of the work he did,” his father, Jimmy Carter, told the South African Press Association.
On 27 July 1994, Carter drove to Parkmore near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child. He locked himself in the car and poisoned it with carbon monoxide using his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe.
Here is an excerpt from his suicide note:
"The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist… depressed… without phone… money for rent… money for child support… money for debts… money!!! …anger & pain… of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police of killer executioners… I have gone to join Ken [his friend who had died recently] if I am that lucky."
