http://static.flickr.com/121/281782970_b6f431cad4_o.jpg
The photo in the above link and the accompanying story have been haunting me for the past several days. Aside from the photo's obvious emotional impact, I'm not sure why it bothers me as much as it does, except that it seems to say something profound about art and human awareness and the solitude of the natural world that I haven't figured out yet--that I need to think more about.
The photo was taken in Sudan during the famine in 1993. It depicts a young girl crawling towards a United Nations food camp about a kilometer away. No one knows what happened to the girl, including the photographer, who, having been cautioned against intervening in local affairs and worried about the possibility of contracting a disease, chased the vulture away and left the scene shortly after getting the shot.
Three months after receiving a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, the photographer, a South African named Kevin Carter, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
His sixteen year old daughter said in an interview that when she looks at the picture she sees in the vulture a symbol for society and in the suffering child an image of her father. Others see it differently: "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of [the girl's] suffering," said the St. Petersburg Times, "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
For me it's hard to look at the image without sharing the latter opinion. Yet, judging by the online bios I read about Kevin Carter, he didn't seem like he was in it--in photography, that is--for the fame and fortune. He wanted to help people. He was an idealist. He thought he could change the world, in a small way, by documenting the tragedies that were happening in Sudan and elsewhere. Not only that, he was far from being a coward. To the contrary, he liked living on the edge and constantly risked his life to get his photographs.
So what happened?
It's hard to say. But just as it's easy to condemn from a distance, it's equally easy to look at the world from a distance--to casually observe through a TV screen, a microscope, a photograph, or a camera lens--and imagine what we might or might not do, and then do nothing. Or do nothing while condemning others for doing nothing. We can lose ourselves in the distance. Artifice, the world as image and abstraction and copy, can placate our desire to act, our will to relate to and engage (and realize our interdependence on) the other; it can bury us. But it can also create a space, the only space possible maybe, wherein self-discovery is really possible.
http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981431,00.html
http://www.thisisyesterday.com/ints/KCarter.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5241442
Wasting time..
2 months ago
5 comments:
I love this:
We can lose ourselves in the distance. Artifice, the world as image and abstraction and copy, can placate our desire to act, our will to relate to and engage (and realize our interdependence on) the other; it can bury us. But it can also create a space, the only space possible maybe, wherein we can truly discover who we are."
To accept interdependence on others is to accept its corollary, lack of autonomy of the self.
How can society based on egoism possibly accept such an attack? IT seems that if GW Bush really is a prick, then the populace that gave him assent must accept responsibility for electing him. Thor help us should reality ever meet our short-sighted selfishness here in the USA.
Perhaps that is why change tends to occur slowly, generally speaking. Should the epiphany of stupidity actually hit us full force, the impact would probably tear us, culturally and socially apart.
My head hurts and its your damned fault. Not thinking is much easier than this.
Ciao,
Trav
True, but I don't think it's reality but the society and culture that are tearing "us culturally and socially apart."
What a haunting photo and story. I'm sure the suicide was about much more than this photo or even the general despair in Africa, but one wonders if he'd been able to help the child, like Nick Ut was able do in his Pulitzer prize winning photo of Kim Phuc (he took her to the hospital), it may have saved him.
I wonder, too. I read that there may've been more than one child and more than one vulture at the same scene. You've gotta think that, in retrospect, he felt as if he failed the little girl (and himself)--that he squandered an opportunity to make a tangible difference.
Yuck. That's awful.
As a freaking addict of a photographer, I spend a lot of time behind my own camera (as is evidenced by my new flickr page); in fact, I would like to become a professional photographer. Certain ex-boyfriends and a certain fiance might argue that I spend too much time behind that lens occasionally. Behind it is an urge to document fiercely a situation - any situation - and to translate the world into a language that makes sense to me, while also sharing my visual language with whomever sees the picture. That similarity makes photography similar to poetry in my eyes, at least in how I relate to them.
But difficult, awful situations, I would like to think I'd help first, shoot later. For example, if I saw a dog in need of help, I wouldn't think what a good shot that made first, I'd put down the camera and run to help the dog. Now, I have run into traffic to help multiple dogs on many occasions and my brain really isn't present in these instances, so I don't know how much logic would have to do with it. I don't think camera-brain would be able to take over when adrenaline-brain had kicked in.
Just perhaps, though, if there were a situation where a dog was hurt and I ran to help and couldn't, but my picture COULD, I might take the picture (if I could stop sobbing). If a thousand dogs were hurt and there wouldn't be a way for me to help even one of them, or I was trying to expose an industry that hurt dogs and couldn't single-handedly take it down... while I can't imagine me saying I'd not get into the dirt and help because I would in any instance I can think of... if my help wouldn't make a difference but my photo might, which I think is a judgment call in many of these photojournalistic scenarios - I would in theory shoot the pictures necessary to get my point across about the horrors being exacted.
I would speculate on the photographer's mental state, but I can't. All I can say is that I sympathize. It's a struggle, to be sure, when it's your job to help through photography, and yet not helping (through photography) is a very easy offense for people to condemn.
I can't forget an episode of "This American Life" I saw that dealt with a situation that's not analogous, but still similar. This documentary photographer watched a woman drown, as he shot the scene, because there were other people helping her. I believe he actually retired after that because it was such a difficult issue for him. Anyway, you can see a small excerpt from the episode (it was the TV version of the show) here - www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcGZhXAi9M8 - but I don't think it portrays the full story or portrays the photographer very well. From what I remember about the story, the episode was somewhat devastating to him, and yet from this clip, it doesn't seem to be.
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