Would Anyone Kill Himself Just 4 Weeks After Winning a Pulitzer Prize?
He wrote in his suicide note: "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy doesn't exist."
Welcome to Be Curious. This week’s story is a little dark (depressing?) but an interesting one. One we can learn a lot from.
It is the story of a photojournalist who killed himself within a month of winning the Pulitzer Prize. But why? Let’s find out.
P.S. I am listening to this audiobook It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey. My fetish for swoon-worthy romance! I am nearing the end. And do you know what, a movie adaptation of this book has been officially confirmed! FUCKING HELL! (Loved this book, as any of the other Tessa Bailey books.)
Okay, that was the news. If you haven’t read (or listened to) the book already, go grab it ASAP.
Yes, that’s fiction; her books always have a happy ending. But the story below isn’t. Be prepared.
Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography award for this picture in 1994.
But only four weeks after receiving the award, he commits suicide.
This is not just a picture. This is one whole story.
So, who is Kevin Carter? And why did this picture shake the entire world when it appeared in the New York Times in 1994?
Let's tell you this story backwards.
It was March 1993, and The New York Times publishes this picture of a girl in the foreground with a vulture eying from nearby.
That was a moving photo. When Americans saw the picture, they became opinionated.
Some argued that Kevin should have saved the child instead of photographing her.
Only later was it revealed that he was a boy and not a girl. But this photo was the talk of the town by then.
And hence, that picture is still called the Vulture and the Little Girl.
So who is that child? And why has he fainted? And what is the context?
This photo was shot in 1993 in Sudan. The country was going through a deadly famine which would kill tens of thousands of people and leave many more homeless.
The child that Kevin Carter photographed was reportedly on his way to reaching a United Nations feeding centre which was about half a mile away from where he had collapsed.
When there was a lot of pressure on the New York Times and people were demanding to know what happened to the child, the newspaper published an editorial stating that he was saved from the vulture but whether he reached the feeding centre was unknown.
Most probably he didn't, people suspected. But obviously, the newspaper would not say that. There was enough rage in the public already about the work of Kevin Carter.
It was not until 2011 that it was revealed that the boy had survived the “vulture attack” and lived through the famine. The child’s father revealed that he had been taken care of by the UN food aid station. But the child had died in 2007, four years earlier, due to a fever.
You may not want to see the photos that appear next. Viewer discretion is advised.But this was not the only photo that Kevin clicked.
He shot many more starving, dying and other violent acts of the war and injustice in general.
One such example is necklacing, a barbaric practice in which a tyre filled with oil is placed around the victim’s neck and is set on fire.
He was the first photographer to shoot a public execution. (You can clearly see a burning tyre in the centre of the picture.)
It was mainly used by the black community to punish those who cooperated with the segregated government. According to some sources, it took around 20 minutes for the victim to die this deadly death.
This is a photo he shot very early on in his career. These photos and more affected and took a hard toll on his mental health. So much so that he committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide in July 1994.
Just weeks after winning the Pulitzer Prize.
So why did he do that?
Why do a job that is neither well appraised nor very pleasant to do? (He faced a lot of criticism for photographing those kinds of pictures.)
Saying what he did was “challenging” would be an understatement.
Because he wanted to bring forward the truth that we didn't see, and nor did we want to see it.
He grew up in an all-white neighbourhood in Johannesburg and often saw black people being arrested by the police.
Later on in his life, he witnessed the Church Street Bombing of 1983 in Pretoria, in which 19 people were killed and 217 injured. That was the turnaround moment in his life. He then decided to pursue a career in news photography.
He was also a member of the Bang Bang Club. It was a group of four conflict photographers: Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbrock and João Silva.
They were active during an unstable period when South Africa was transitioning from the apartheid system to democracy and it was a bloodbath all around.
The name “The Bang Bang Club” was born out of an article published in the South African magazine Living.
It was active from 1990 to 1994. They filmed many mind-wrenching and dystopian photos together.
But it showed the world the reality. The horror of war. Of famine. Of instability. Of injustice. Of violence. Of suffering. Of death.
Witnessing this all took a toll on his mental health.
He saw people dying and burning and being killed in front of him—dozens of times.
But he was passionate about his cause. He had this to say after witnessing the deadly necklacing:
“I was appalled at what they were doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”
He knew what he was doing was mentally exhausting, but he wanted to make his contribution by making the world aware of the horrors of a “third-world country.”
He lived in some of the poorest countries for all his life. But his work reached far and wide. It drew some criticism, but it was a testament to the fact that people were seeing the truth through his photos, and more often than not, they didn’t want to see it.
When enough was enough for Kevin Carter
Though Kevin was immensely happy after winning the Pulitzer Prize, but unfortunately, he couldn’t process the grief of the death of his best friend. Additionally, he was also facing some serious money crisis, as he points out in his suicide note.
Kevin wrote to his parents back in Johannesburg after winning the Pulitzer Prize: “I swear I got the most applause of anybody. …I can’t wait to show you the trophy. It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgement of my work I could receive.”
A few days after his Pulitzer was announced in April, Kevin Carter was nearby when one of his closest friends and a Bang Bang Club member, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead while photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township.
It shook Kevin from head to toe. People often said that Kevin was an emotional person and that his job sometimes depressed him deeply. But this was just too much.
“Kevin always carried around the horror of the work he did,” his father, Jimmy Carter, told the South African Press Association
On 27 July 1994, Carter drove to Parkmore near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child. He locked himself in the car and poisoned it with carbon monoxide using his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe.
Here is an excerpt from his suicide note:
I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …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 [his friend who had died recently] if I am that lucky.
That’s a sad ending indeed. It is the story of how hard the journey is for a person to bring a picture to life. To tell a story that no one knew was happening. To bring truth to life. He devoted his entire life to this cause. And he succeeded.