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 to touch the famine victims,
because of the risk of transmitting disease, but
Carter came under criticism for not helping the
girl. ”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,” read
one editorial.
Carter eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this
photo, but he couldn’t enjoy it. “I’m really, really
sorry I didn’t pick the child up,” he confided in a
friend. Consumed with the violence he’d witnessed,
and haunted by the questions as to the little girl’s
fate, he committed suicide three months later

Very touching.

The film 'Bang Bang Club' was based on this story. I could only imagine how that would have haunted him. Even taking the child to the plane may not have guaranteed her survival.

Wow, God willing I hope that child survived. Today that child would be around the age of a lot of us on this forum.

Very haunting.

wow

Life is full of sadness

Redoil: Life is full of sadness

It is, but it is also full of happy times. There will always be tears and smiles but while we are alive we should cherish every day and thank God and always try to be in the right of mind. Treat others with as much love as you can.

what a heartbreaking yet touching story.

Fulaman198:

It is, but it is also full of happy times. There will always be tears and smiles but while we are alive we should cherish every day and thank God and always try to be in the right of mind. Treat others with as much love as you can.

^^^