Most shocking picture ever

heart breaking
tragic
awful
sad

as I look down at my over sized belly, not being able to take my kids to disney doesn't seem like something to worry about anymore

and poor kevin, I'm sure he took a lot of grief, but to be honest, even if she gets to the camp, she probably doesn't make it.

I bet there are local warlords intercepting aid

they are the real villians

I guess I'm missing something a buzzard and a kid. Nice set up good lighting

That picture reminded me of this song.
reply to post by syrinx high priest

Originally posted by eManym
Feed the child? The photographer would have been instantly mobbed by the numerous people that are in his area travelling to the food distribution camp.

Very strong absolute statement delivered as fact, I would suggest that 'maybe' or 'perhaps' would be more appropriate while sharing an opinion.

Originally posted by eManym
Carry the child? If you carry the child to the food camp does it become your child.

I would assume not, especially due to him being a foreign national travelling with the UN Operation Lifeline Sudan mission.

St. Petersburg Times, Florida 1994
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.

I can understand the outrage of all the posters on this thread because it's such a shocking picture but, as in any news story, the content is cherry-picked and gets twisted around to make the photographer look evil.

What actually happened was that Carter was part of a UN operation and the plane only landed briefly to hand out food. Carter's assistant (most people don't know that) reported that the mother was actually with this child and left to get food from the center. The vulture landed and Carter was shocked but decided to take the picture. He is, afer all, a photographer, bent on showing the western world the kind of famine third worlds deal with. He took many other pictures of famine-stricken families but those were never published.

It is sad that Carter drew such vicious criticism that he ended up taking his own life. It wasn't the first time, though. He suffered from depression and tried to commit suicide before this unfortunate incident.

I'm surprised more people haven't seen this decades old picture many times before and how little people know about Kevin Carter.

And yet here you all are, judging him for not doing anything. Wow.

Such a great photographer, and a great photo.

reply to post by Jaellma


This picture is symbolic of a lot of things, but namely, the relationship the West has with the rest of the world and how they treat them as objects opposed to fellow human beings and reward each other for it with prizes. The guilt must have caught up with this one after he realized what he did. Or didn't do, I should say. I didn't know he committed suicide.

Originally posted by skepticconwatcher
reply to post by Jaellma

 

This picture is symbolic of a lot of things, but namely, the relationship the West has with the rest of the world and how they treat them as objects opposed to fellow human beings and reward each other for it with prizes. The guilt must have caught up with this one after he realized what he did. Or didn't do, I should say. I didn't know he committed suicide.

Again, the mother was with the child but briefly left to get food from the food center. The vulture just landed and that's why he took the picture. He wasn't obligated to do anything, the story was inaccurate, and he knew the mother was coming back.

If a photographer gets involved in what hes supposed to be taking photographs we wouldn't have any photographs to see what happened. Which is more important help a few or take pictures that could stir up enough feeling world wide to help many?

Lets face it this would be a horrible position to be in. I mean that poor child was probably just one of many, you can not carry them all..so which ones do you leave behind? How do you decide which ones are more deserving? Would you help the ones about to die (and might not make it) or the ones not as bad and probably would make it if they got help? What do you do when you have got that one to the food place..go back for more?

Can you be a professional photographer and a full time helper? A lot of the time photographers are only allowed into certain area if they dont get involved. Its one of the things that reporters rely on so they can get the pictures.

So many difficult questions..glad ive never had to make those decisions.

reply to post by skepticconwatcher
Yes he did. There are several varying accounts of what really happened to Carter, what type of person he was etc but his picture paints a thousand words, irrespective of his what really happened that day in Sudan.

Originally posted by skepticconwatcher
reply to post by Jaellma

 

This picture is symbolic of a lot of things, but namely, the relationship the West has with the rest of the world and how they treat them as objects opposed to fellow human beings and reward each other for it with prizes. The guilt must have caught up with this one after he realized what he did. Or didn't do, I should say. I didn't know he committed suicide.

Some of his suicide note read :

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 and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners

The reasons for taking his own life were a lot more complex than guilt over the subject of a single photograph.

What exactly would you have had him do for the kid?
From what i remember the child was outcast from the tribe, he was ill, there are a thousands more kids like this one, some probably get eaten alive, by the animals or by their tribe.

do not attack the man who took the photo, or else you'd never had understood this sort of thing exists.

tell me, from the comfort of your computer chair at home, what are you doing for the kid ?

What exactly would you have had him do for the kid?
From what i remember the child was outcast from the tribe, he was ill, there are a thousands more kids like this one, some probably get eaten alive, by the animals or by their tribe.

do not attack the man who took the photo, or else you'd never had understood this sort of thing exists.

tell me, from the comfort of your computer chair at home, what are you doing for the kid ?

I'm not certain there was much that could be done.
If not then, but some point in the near future the fate is the same. For us all, no less.

If the image didn't exist, you wouldn't know. Double edged sword.

All I am seeing is a photo of a Vulture.

Originally posted by mardukiscoming
All I am seeing is a photo of a Vulture.

I really hope that's some twisted form of sarcasm.

Scroll over, if not.

The most shocking picture im seeing here is the OPs willingness to misrepresent the facts at hand concerning both the image in question and the death of this photographer, Kevin Carter.

How many star and flags are our collective guilt worth eh?

A bit of background on the photo ~ the group the photographer was travelling with was told not to feed the starving because their stomachs would reject regular food. At the camp there was a gruel mix that was mild enough for their bellies to digest.

I read the child made it to camp and was taken care of, but I don't know if that's true because I also read elsewhere that she died.

This is all not true by our accounts.

He did indeed chase the vulture away.

The picture was taken while the photographers were on a 30-minute food drop at a designated camp.
The vultures were attracted by a pit-toilet (some say it's actually visible in the background).
The photo Carter took to draw attention to the situation in Sudan was so successfully dramatic that it ended up ruining his reputation (although it did win prizes).

The fact is that the vulture was actually 20 meters behind the child, who was already in a camp with food.
Despite this some witnesses say Carter chased away the specific bird.

Carter was a member of South Africa's "bang-bang club", a famous group of photographers who documented the political violence in South Africa while under constant fire from various sides.
This trauma, drug abuse and unemployment led to his suicide.

Some go as far now as to call the picture a hoax.
It was not a hoax in what was found, but it is hoax in what it presents - a lone and helpless child about to be consumed by a vulture.
Many of the children in these camps survived.

A Portuguese photojournalist based in South Africa who accompanied Carter to Sudan, gave a different version of events in an interview with Japanese journalist and writer Akio Fujiwara that was published in Fujiwara's book The Boy who Became a Postcard (絵葉書にされた少年 - Ehagaki ni sareta shōnen).[7] According to Silva, Carter and Silva travelled to Sudan with the United Nations aboard Operation Lifeline Sudan and landed in Southern Sudan on 11 March 1993. The UN told them that they would take off again in 30 minutes (the time necessary to distribute food), so they ran around looking to take shots. The UN started to distribute corn and the women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. Silva went looking for guerrilla fighters, while Carter strayed no more than a few dozen feet from the plane. Again according to Silva, Carter was quite shocked as it was the first time that he had seen a famine situation and so he took many shots of the children suffering from famine. Silva also started to take photos of children on the ground as if crying, which were not published. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane, so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the girl in the photo taken by Carter. A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos before chasing the bird away. Two Spanish photographers who were in the same area at that time, José María Luis Arenzana and Luis Davilla, without knowing the photograph of Kevin Carter, took a picture in a similar situation. As recounted on several occasions, it was a feeding center, and the vultures came from a manure pit waste: "We took him and Pepe Arenzana to Ayod, where most of the time were in a feeding center where locals go. At one end of the enclosure, was a dump where waste and was pulling people to defecate. As these children are so weak and malnourished they are going head giving the impression that they are dead. As part of the fauna there are vultures go for these remains. So if you grab a telephoto crush the child's perspective in the foreground and background and it seems that the vultures will eat it, but that's an absolute hoax, perhaps the animal is 20 meters."

en.wikipedia.org...

The photo kept interest in aid alive, and facilitated the feeding of many people.
Perhaps it didn't do much for vultures, which are now highly endangered across Africa (possibly regionally extinct) for several reasons, but I'm sure some of these majestic birds (which are attracted to rotting flesh and putrid things, and pose no danger to people) were killed because of the picture.

But there's a clear agenda to label anything that actually produces greater crop yields and furthers global feeding as "evil" and "wicked" by some brainwashed, self-righteous Western food fascists and pseudo-hippies.
They are the biggest disaster really to ever effect global hunger in the post-modern world.
So let everyone know the truth, and let the people be fed.

reply to post by Jaellma
There is a movie based off of the man who took this pic, it is called "The Bang Bang Club" pretty good flick, this guy saw much ore than this pic...