Photographs that will shock the world: Vulture
In 1994, the Pulitzer Prize for Photojournalism was obtained with this shocking photograph of a Sudanese child, that would attract the attention of the World due to the humanitarian drama they lived, and we still live, in Sudan and a bit in the whole African Continent. Testing camp of the so called civilized world which has tried for centuries arrogantly impose models of social, political and economic organization based on their civilized concepts, Africa remains a tribal continent, however the "civilizing" sometimes neglected their reward for the "magnanimous gesture ", almost renaissant, of "spread the faith of democracy for the savages ": the take out.
The south African photographer Kevin Carter was the author of this photograph obtained in 1993 in Ayod, a small district of the state of Junqali, Sudan, that traveled the entire World: the skeletal figure of a little girl, completely undernourished, bending over the earth, exhausted by hunger, about to die, dragging herself to a ONU feeding field which was a kilometer away from where she was, meanwhile in a second frame a black and expectant figure of a vulture awaits the death of the little girl.
The south African photographer Kevin Carter was the author of this photograph obtained in 1993 in Ayod, a small district of the state of Junqali, Sudan, that traveled the entire World: the skeletal figure of a little girl, completely undernourished, bending over the earth, exhausted by hunger, about to die, dragging herself to a ONU feeding field which was a kilometer away from where she was, meanwhile in a second frame a black and expectant figure of a vulture awaits the death of the little girl.
Carter says that he waited nearly twenty minutes for the vulture to leave and, since such thing didn´t occur, he quickly took the photograph, scared off the vulture protecting the child, and abandoning the place as quickly as possible.
Many voices were raised at the time against Carter´s attitude, comparing in a certain way to the vulture and questioning why he hadn´t helped the little girl. Even though by then photographers have a rigid behavior code that implied, in this type of scenarios, they will never approach a hungry person due to the possibility of disease transmissions, Kevin confessed that he regretted not helping the little girl.
Carter was one of the integrands of a group called the Bang-Bang Club, a group of four friends, photojournalists,that dedicated themselves to exposing to the eyes of the world the brutal regime of the South African aparthied. In the middle of the 80´s Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by necklacing in South Africa, and in the course of his career he lived uncountable episodes of violence in scenarios of was and humanitarian disaster.
Two months after he received for this image a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1994, bitter and punished by guilt, physically unstable, depending of narcotics and destroyed by the death of one of his close friends and element of The Bang-Bang Club, Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter committed suicide. He was 33 years old and left a goodbye note:
"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."
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Aftering witnessing such horror and then facing horror in thier own life alot of people would come to the conclusion that horror is what it(life) is all about....and want no part of it.............I have felt that way many times myself
the date that the picture was taken of the starving girl being stalked by a vulture was 1993 not"1933."
The terrible irony of the photo and the photographer's death by his own hands...(Brought to my attention by a student of mine. Thanks Ismael.)
A poem that I wrote explores the universe's indifference to death:
DEATH NOTICES
[First published in “Love and Fear: A Poetry Anthology, 2003.]
she died
even the ambulance
was ambivalent
a baby died
lying still on its back
they thought about
their income tax
1000 died
spiralling down in a plane
his world remained
exactly the same
a fly dies
legs kicking in the air
all the ceremony
of a Jew with no hair
shovelled into the earth's gaping hungry trench where
your god (not mine)
I’m bound by truth to say
amuses himself
in strangely mysterious ways
Amazing...
seven em 5 de October de 2009popular
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