This is a photograph we spoke about in our CMS class on Monday. it came up when we were looking at the different times of day to take photo’s, but the discussion that followed was a lot more than that.
Taken by photographer Kevin Carter, he won the Pulitzer Prize for it, but after the scrutiny he faced from people around the world, Carter committed suicide.
so, when it is your job and livelihood to take pictures, do you look at this and snap the shot with the possibility of spreading awareness and possibly helping thousands, or do you put down your lens and help this one child, and risk never in your life getting the opportunity to take a picture like this again?
there was a lot of debate in class. yes, the child has been immortalised in history for the rest of eternity, but she is immortalised as a victim. i don’t know where i stand with this one. i don’t know if i would have been able to take this picture, but then again i am not a photographer.
i think a lot of the scrutiny he came under was the ‘blame game.’ carter brought the world the reality of the horrors that were and still are in existence. humans have this thing we do where if we cant comprehend the acts of humanity which frighten us, we choose to blame someone for it, or for something relating to it, so that we don’t have to deal with the actual problem.
one thing is for sure, this is a brilliant picture and deserved the prize it received, and Carter was a brave man for showing the world the truths of things that at the time people would rather have blissfully ignored.
In March 1993, photographer Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan, where he took now iconic photo of a vulture preying upon an emaciated Sudanese toddler near the village of Ayod. Carter said he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. (The parents of the girl were busy taking food from the same UN plane Carter took to Ayod).
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993 as ‘metaphor for Africa’s despair’. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run an unusual special editor’s note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. Journalists in the Sudan were told not…
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kimblesfreese 