{"id":1723,"date":"2012-10-28T21:34:04","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T02:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/?p=1723"},"modified":"2012-10-28T21:34:04","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T02:34:04","slug":"photographer-kevin-carter-an-image-that-took-its-toll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/?p=1723","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Kevin Carter: An image that took its toll"},"content":{"rendered":"

The pastor at the church I attend said in the context of this Sunday’s lesson from the gospels that some times one sees some thing that is so disturbing or traumatic that it is impossible to “unsee” it. Within this category is one of the iconic photographs of human suffering and cruelty by human beings to their fellow humans.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t. 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).<\/p>\n

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The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993 as \u2018metaphor for Africa\u2019s despair\u2019. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run an unusual special editor\u2019s 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. \u201dThe 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,\u201d read one editorial.<\/p>\n

Carter eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, but he couldn\u2019t enjoy it. \u201cI\u2019m really, really sorry I didn\u2019t pick the child up,\u201d he confided in a friend. Consumed with the violence he\u2019d witnessed, and haunted by the questions as to the little girl\u2019s fate, he committed suicide three months later. Of course, there were other factors that contributed to his suicide but the image that won him a Pulitzer and the toll it took on him played a part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The pastor at the church I attend said in the context of this Sunday’s lesson from the gospels that some times one sees some thing that is so disturbing or traumatic that it is impossible to “unsee” it. Within this category is one of the iconic photographs of human suffering and cruelty by human beings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1725,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions\/1725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josephclan.com\/tjblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}