Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter (13 September 1960 – 27 July 1994) was an award-winning South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan. He committed suicide at the age of 33. His story is depicted in the 2010 feature film, The Bang-Bang-Club in which he he was played by Taylor Kitsch.
Kevin Carter was born in apartheid South Africa and grew up in a middle-class, whites-only neighborhood. As a child, he occasionally saw police raids to arrest blacks who were illegally living in the area. He said later that he questioned how his parents, a Catholic, "liberal" family, could be what he described as 'lackadaisical' about fighting against apartheid.
After high school, Carter dropped out of his studies to become a pharmacist and was drafted into the army, which he hated. To escape from the infantry he signed up for the professional air force, mistakenly trapping himself into four years of service. In 1980, he witnessed a black mess-hall waiter being insulted. Carter defended the man, resulting in him being badly beaten by the other soldiers. He then went AWOL, attempted to start a new life as a radio disk-jockey named "David". This, however, proved more difficult than he had anticipated. Suffering from depression, he attempted suicide. Soon after, he decided to serve out the rest of his required military service. After witnessing the Church Street bombing in Pretoria in 1983, he decided to become a news photographer.
Carter had started to work as weekend sports photographer in 1983. In 1984 he moved on to work for the Johannesburg Star, bent on exposing the brutality of apartheid.
Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by "necklacing" in South Africa in the mid-1980s. The victim was Maki Skosana, who had been accused of having a relationship with a police officer. He later spoke of the images; "I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was 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."
On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfontein Spruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning, aged 33. Portions of Carter's 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 ... I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky."
Cultural depictions
Kevin Carter was born in apartheid South Africa and grew up in a middle-class, whites-only neighborhood. As a child, he occasionally saw police raids to arrest blacks who were illegally living in the area. He said later that he questioned how his parents, a Catholic, "liberal" family, could be what he described as 'lackadaisical' about fighting against apartheid.
After high school, Carter dropped out of his studies to become a pharmacist and was drafted into the army, which he hated. To escape from the infantry he signed up for the professional air force, mistakenly trapping himself into four years of service. In 1980, he witnessed a black mess-hall waiter being insulted. Carter defended the man, resulting in him being badly beaten by the other soldiers. He then went AWOL, attempted to start a new life as a radio disk-jockey named "David". This, however, proved more difficult than he had anticipated. Suffering from depression, he attempted suicide. Soon after, he decided to serve out the rest of his required military service. After witnessing the Church Street bombing in Pretoria in 1983, he decided to become a news photographer.
Carter had started to work as weekend sports photographer in 1983. In 1984 he moved on to work for the Johannesburg Star, bent on exposing the brutality of apartheid.
Carter was the first to photograph a public execution by "necklacing" in South Africa in the mid-1980s. The victim was Maki Skosana, who had been accused of having a relationship with a police officer. He later spoke of the images; "I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was 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."
On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfontein Spruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning, aged 33. Portions of Carter's 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 ... I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky."
Cultural depictions
- A documentary entitled The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.
- The Welsh band Manic Street Preachers recorded a song about him on their 1996 album Everything Must Go.
- There is a song 'Kevin Carter' on the 1996 album of Martin Simpson and Jessica Ruby Simpson, Band of Angels, which is a mainly factual, minimalist, and informative ballad.
- Poets and Madmen by heavy metal band Savatage is a loose concept-album based on a fictitious investigation of his legacy.
- Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves attributes a prize-winning photograph, based on that of Carter, to the novel's protagonist, Will Navidson. Within the confines of the novel, the starving Sudanese child is named Delial by Navidson. The story describes a photo similar to Carter's Pulitzer Prize-winning image, with footnotes directly referring to Carter and his suicide.
- Masha Hamilton's 2004 novel The Distance Between Us mentions Kevin Carter and is dedicated to "Kevin Carter and journalists everywhere who put their bodies and their souls on the line to cover war."
- Chilean born visual artist Alfredo Jaar presented the story of Kevin Carter and his Pullitzer Prize-winning photograph in the work The Sound of Silence, a cinematic video installation presented in his Politics of the Image exhibition at the South London Gallery in 2008. The narration goes on to tell about the life of the photograph after the death of its author.
- In 2010, he was played by Taylor Kitsch in the film The Bang-Bang-Club.
- The Canadian indie rock band Blinker the Star mentions Kevin Carter's death in their song "Still in Rome," from the 2003 album of the same name.