kevin carter.

1508hrs

Listening to:

Manic Street Preachers – Kevin Carter [single] (1996)

No one writes more poignantly tragic songs than the Manics:

"Hi Time magazine, hi Pulitzer Prize
Vulture stalked white piped lie forever
Wasted your life in black and white."

This single was from MSP's 1996 album Everything Must Go, their first album after the mysterious disappearance of band member Richey James a year earlier. (He is still missing.) And although the big hit from this album was definitely "A Design For Life", here's the story behind "Kevin Carter".

Carter was a real person: an award-winning South African photojournalist who specialised in civil war photography, but became (in)famous for a photo he took in 1993 of a starving Sudanese child who was about to be attacked by a waiting vulture. The photo can be seen here; a warning though, it's quite disturbing.

Critics castigated Carter for taking the photo and not helping the child. Which comes to the point of this post: if you were a journalist in such a situation, would you help the person and sacrifice a priceless photo opportunity, or would you give up the photo op and save the person?

Despite the public backlash, Carter won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Later on, he revealed that he had chased the vulture away after taking the picture, but felt guilty for not helping the child further.

At what price did the perfect photo op come?

Just weeks after being awarded the Pulitzer, Kevin Carter committed suicide out of depression.