The life of Kevin Carter - Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Photography in 1994

Kevin Carter was the Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Photography in 1994

The story of the life of Kevin Carter somehow inspired me to write all about him. At the very young age of 33, he committed suicide leaving a suicide note that states:

"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 ... I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."

Carter was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. During his childhood, he occasionally saw police raids arresting illegally living blacks in the area. He drafted into the Army and dropped out of his studies in pharmacy. He enlisted in the Air Force to escape from the infantry. He once was "David", a radio disk-jockey, when he went AWOL from the Air Force but soon had decided to serve the rest of his required military service.

In May 20, 1983, a car bomb attack dubbed as the "Church Street Bombing", killed 19 and wounded 217 people in Pretoria. That was the time that Carter witnessed the horrifying event and decided to become a news photographer.

The most striking moment of his career

This happened on March 11, 1993 while on his trip to Sudan for a feeding mission together with the United Nations. Carter saw a starving toddler in a feeding center who was briefly left behind by his mother who was collecting foods from the UN. A vulture landed behind the boy and he slowly approached the two to get a photo from approximately 10 meters away. Carter chased away the vulture after taking more pictures and left the scene.

Here's the photograph of a starving toddler with a vulture behind him that won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. The picture raised a debate on the humanness of the photographing community.

On July 27, 1994, Carter committed suicide by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the driver's side window, at the age of 33. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Images via Wikipedia