"There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer"
Photography: It could make you smile with some of the most spectacular views of nature and with another second that follows, it may torn you to pieces, making you cry thousand times, exploding disgust, humility, pain, anguish or whatever emotions that you have never even known before........pulling every bit of yours to an arena that you might never ever even have dreamed to face so far.
In this, the very first entry to my blog i will try to unmask the life of Kevin Carter, a much known photographer by his famous photograph of the "Starving child with vulture".
There is a lot of ambiguity about his real place. Was he a "Hero"? or just another fame light lover photographer. We will see this with different perspectives and will also try to find out what he really deserves!
Carter won Pulitzer award for this very picture, he captured in Famine stricken Sudan during a civil movement on March 23rd , 1993. But with the publication of this picture in "The New York Times", critics all over the world started questioning the ethics of the man behind the lens. People started asking what happened, afterward, to the little girl in the picture? Did she survived? Did the photographer helped her? But people didn't have answer what happened to her.
St. Petersburg Florida times said,
"The men adjusting his lens to take just the right picture of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
Some people said it a "Fluke". Even some of Kevin's friends wondered aloud why he didn't help the poor little girl. He explained later that the girl was trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to take her picture, a vulture landed in view. He waited for the vulture to spread his wings for some time and finally took the shot. Afterwords, he chased down the bird to fly away. Later, when he saw the picture he had taken, he became depressed and lit a cigarette, talked to god and cried. He kept saying he wanted to hug the girl.
The question here shouldn't be whether or not Kevin had saved that poor little girl, but it had to be the other way round. You have to see the situation with different perspective. Do you think helping that one poor little creature could have made it any better to the suffering people of Sudan then. Even if he had helped her to get past that little storm, (which actually he did later on, just it was not within the sequence of peoples demand) could it had had any impact on her life waiting in dark? By capturing this particular picture and facing it towards world he did pulled out some help from all over the world. If he would have gone to that long to think about it, he might have lost it and we would have never ever been able to understood what actually people were facing in those places.
In reality, it's not like these things do not cross our minds too. In our daily life we could have seen thousands of such incidents and even have had them face to face, but to truly realize what is happening needs a blow and that was what done by Carter.
Kevin Carter
"A photograph isn't a photograph at all if it doesn't touch the hearts and induces curiosity in your viewers"
In the history, Kevin was born in Park-more, a tree lined Johannesburg suburb on Sept. 13, 1960, the year Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was outlawed. His Roman Catholic parents, Jimmy and Roma, had accepted apartheid. The police used to go arrest the black people for not carrying there passes. Kevin later, like many of his counter age, soon started arguing. "Why can't we do something to help them? Why can't we yell at those police man?"
Once he took the side of a black mess hall waitress. The African speaking soldier's laughed at him making fun of him saying him a kaffir-boetie (a nigger lover) and beat him up. He had also tried to commit suicide after losing his job. He survived. He had served in South African Defense Force (S.A.D.F) and lucky enough to survive in a bomb explosion there too. But he got hurt. He then drifted into journalism. He joined the photojournalists who wanted to expose the brutality of apartheid.
He was the first to photograph a public neck lacing in South Africa in July, 1985. The victim was burned to death with a tyre around her neck while attending the funeral of one of the youths. Her body had been scorched by fire and some broken pieces of glass has been inserted into her v..g..a. Also, a big rock had been thrown on her face after she had been killed.
He said in an interview,
"After witnessing so many neck-lacing on the news, it occurs to me either many others being performed and this was just the tip of the iceberg, or that the presence of the camera completed the last requirement........the question that hunts me is would those people have been neck-laced, if there was no media coverage."
On July 27, 1994, Carter committed suicide. He died by carbonmonooxide poisoning. It was just fourteen months from the day he won Pulitzer. What could have forced him to die? Neither the triumph nor the glory proved successful to save the legend of photography. The answer lies in his death note.
In his death note he wrote,
"I am depressed....without phone....money for child support.....money for dept......money!!! I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings, corpses and anger and pain....of starving and wounded children, trigger happy mad man, often police, of killer executioners............i have always had it all at my feet.......but being me just fit up anyway.....i have gone to join Ken if i am that lucky"
I think, i have made my point. Rest is up to you people!
