Ethical Kevin: Aditya Prakash

©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.