I’ve had this saved in my image file for — I don’t know how long.
This photograph of a collapsed, starving Sudanese toddler being stalked by a vulture was taken in 1993 by photojournalist Kevin Carter. He won a Pulitzer for it in May 1994 and killed himself in July 1994. His suicide note read, in part:
“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.”
Wow… That’s… wow…
And aren’t we all this child? Shouldn’t we all remember that everyone else is as well? How we could change the world…
I have often wondered how the people who go to document that kind of horror do not either go mad, or want to scoop up, take home, and save every person they encounter.
ricki — Carter really wasn’t able to get past all the horror he witnessed, which is partly why he killed himself. That, and all the notoriety he gained from the vulture photo — from snapping the picture but not helping the child, who was on her way to a feeding center. He did, apparently, shoo the bird away and the toddler eventually made it to her destination, but beyond that, nothing more is known about the little girl.
Just a few months before his suicide, his best friend Ken — also a member, like Carter, of a group of daring South African photojournalists known as the Bang-Bang Club — was accidentally killed in a violent uprising near Johannesburg. Carter thought — wished — he would have taken the bullet insted. He was tormented by constantly witnessing and constantly surviving so much violence, by the stark, terrifying clarity of that juxtaposition.
Yeah – Kevin Carter’s story always really haunted me. Unbelievable.
That picture is worth a million words.
I can see how that would drive a guy insane. Poor guy. Normally I hear about a suicide and I actually get a little annoyed – there’s so much to do! There are billions of un-crappy people in the world! Don’t give up! It’s terribly sad but more than a little frustrating that they didn’t see their own promise or any possibility of their own happiness – or someone else’s happiness in a trusted friend or a soulmate.
But someone under such extremes… Damn.
Nightfly – well, also there’s clinical depression, which I suffer from. And it’s agony. Sometimes you just want to end the agony. And so the suicidal plans sometimes feel quite practical, as in: I can no longer endure these psychic brainstorms … and I am becoming a BURDEN on others…. I can’t go to work anymore, my life means nothing …” Suicide begins to look very attractive when you have not just a MOMENT of thinking like that … but MONTHS, sometimes YEARS. It’s like living with a terminable disease and if you can’t get the right medication, or the right balance … you literally don’t know what to do, you feel cursed, the black clouds are literally (yes, literally) coming down on you, blocking out the light, disorienting you completely. Anyone who has depression will know what I am talking about. It’s not about “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel” – it’s not emotional, or intellectual. It’s physical. That’s the thing that is the worst part to a true depressive. To say to someone who is suicidal, “Life goes on!” is to say, “Your agony will NEVER end.” It’s the worst possible thing to say.
There is a beautiful peace that happens when you decide to end your life. Not a pretty fact, but a fact nonetheless.
So I never get annoyed at suicidal people. It’s more like I wish that they had had a dear friend, or … that their anxiety and despair would lift for maybe just a moment …I wish that they had had just some PEACE. I know their pain.
Kevin Carter’s psyche was shattered by what he saw. There was no going back for him – he could not find his way back to the man he once had been. It was a complete jarring of his entire personality – and very few people can withstand something like that. Maybe he had a predisposition to depression – that’s possible, too.