©Kevin
Carter 1993
I
was Kevin Carter. My life was a farce. This room is dark. I feel
cold. I feel hollow like something has eaten the person I used to be.
I can’t feel my body. I can’t identify with myself. I am a
junkie drawing on his white
pipe, lying on his saggy
couch in his despicable dark room. I shouldn’t live.
Sixteen
months ago, in the March of ’93, I was absorbed by the scene before
me. A child lay in the dust. Its elbows were bent and its forearms
lay like dried sticks on the ground. Its knees were bent too and its
face was in the mud. It was one of several famine victims, but the
scene was made special by the presence of a vulture. This creature
was scrutinizing the child from about 10 feet away.
I
was experienced enough as a photojournalist by this time, to know
that the scene had dramatic potential. I carefully squatted down to
have my subjects at eye level. The vulture and the child were
straight ahead of me and the gap between them made things very
literal: A child lying in the dust and a vulture waiting on clear
ground. I needed a more compelling shot that intertwined the fates of
my subjects. I shuffled slowly to the right, clicking frenetically,
afraid that the vulture would fly away. An average shot would
obviously be better than no shot at all. After twenty minutes of
quiet trial my camera was looking straight at the vulture. The child
lay in the foreground to the right. My angle had greatly reduced the
spatial aspect between them. It had made the vulture a desperate
devil that would start gnawing at the child alive, if it didn’t
collapse soon. It was no longer a quiet scavenger contemplating
whether it will feed on death. It was a certain killer. The child
itself now embodied the suffering of millions of Sudanese. The brutal
war and resulting famine had reduced them to bony carrion. Its little
body was prostrated in the dust, begging for life. It was this
spectacle that I clicked and the drama won me the Pulitzer Prize in
April, three months ago.
My
work had received the highest praise in the world of photography. The
photograph compressed the sufferings of the Sudanese and delivered
them to the desk of the informed civilian. Several newspapers had
bought the rights to publish the picture. That beautiful picture
would be the banner of several Aid Programs.
So,
if I kill myself now it may seem like I died in exhilaration. A man,
who for unsaid reasons, decides to jump off the mountain he has just
summited, climbing the stairway to heaven with fulfillment. It is not
so. The Pulitzer was no achievement. The incident was a mirror that
showed me the worthlessness of existence. It was an omen that
foretold my death.
*
I
was never the same after April. My motivation for my job was
internally being questioned. As I ran behind angry mobs and clicked
pictures of brutalities, I felt like a plant. My passiveness to the
situations I was photographing had begun to disconcert me. I had been
photographing for a decade. I had always believed that my photographs
would expose injustice and bring about change. South Africa’s
apartheid had now ended but it wasn’t because of me. I had been as
insensitive as the trigger happy madmen who had butchered people on
the streets in civil war. They had shot people as I shot photographs.
But their lives were more fulfilled than mine. They had achieved
their purpose. I had lived inconsequentially all along. Their bullets
had ended lives which my photographs could not save.
The
crumpled copy of the St. Petersburg Times on the desk reads, “The
man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of [the girl’s]
suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the
scene”. I have read this line over and over again. With each
reading, my soul seems to forge a stronger alliance with its author.
My soul has defected from the sins of my self. It now finds solace
among the various allegations that have shaken me over the past
months. It seems to ask in unison with the confident blonde
journalist at the press conference, “Why didn’t you help the
child?” and my counter assertion that I did evaporates as distant
echo.
As
I countered this question with the excuse of professionalism in press
conference after press conference, another journalist remarked, “It
is understandable that getting the picture was priority but why could
you not pick the girl up afterwards or at least shoo the vulture
away?” After this, the buzz of dissent grew louder. The people were
turning against me as I turned against myself. The barrier between my
personal and professional life began to rot. I was left with
desperate longing to unite with my daughter. I had never been a
father to her. I never even married her mother.
*
“Do you know what happened to the
girl?”, the jury of journalists had asked me. I was too weak to
even attempt an answer. I had never been good to my little girl and I
had not been good to someone else’s little girl. I had let her die
in the desert and left her parents to mourn. I could only feel a
wrinkly deflation of my self respect amidst the angry buzz. I didn’t
care if the mob lynched me, like the several casualties I had
photographed. I deserved it all.
All
us photographers had wasted our lives. We could have saved a few
people. We could have carried the wounded to hospital. Instead we
chose to photograph. My colleague, Greg, won a Pulitzer for
photographing a man who was stabbed multiple times and set on fire
when he fell unconscious. The photograph was a cold piece of paper
that hid the screams of the victim.
The
white pipe wouldn’t relax me anymore. The weed laced with Mandrax
in the Dagga
would mellow me on the job. But now it cannot help me from slipping
into introspection. Every time I smoke up, I feel the void in me get
bigger. People have died because of me and it has taken me ten years
to accept this. I cannot forgive myself. I must live in solitude,
shut away from horrible memories and the guilt of my actions.
But
Jo’burg or any other place in the world cannot offer me what I am
looking for. I had written to a friend on my return from Sudan that,
“Jo’burg
is dry and brown and cold and dead, and so damn full of bad memories
and absent friends”. There is no solitude for a man on this earth.
There is always the cruel company of memory. This is when "the
pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist”.
***
Note:
The quotation marks in Kevin’s internal speech are taken verbatim
from his conversations with people. Kevin Carter died on July 27,
1994. This is a purely fictional account of what might have
transpired in his mind before he decided to kill himself. This work
is not meant to undermine his goodness as an individual.
Aditya is a second year student of the MA in Development Studies programme at TISS, Mumbai.
