Kevin Carter holding his camera while a man hides behind a drum Image source
Event Type:
Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, committed suicide just three months after winning the Pulitzer Award for feature photography of a controversial picture depicting famine in Sudan. Carter came under a lot of criticism for a disturbing photograph of a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture in 1993. On 18 April, 1994, only 6 days after Carter won the Pulitzer, the Bang-Bang Club made their way to Tokowa to photograph an outbreak of violence in the area. Later in the day he heard over the radio that his friend Ken Oosterbroek had been killed in the conflict and Greg Marinovich was seriously injured.
Carter and his friends longed to expose the atrocities of Apartheid to the world; they captured the violence of South Africa so vividly that they were dubbed "The Bang-Bang Club." Carter died after he backed his red Nissan truck against a blue gum tree, attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe, and rolled up the window of his car. He turned on his walkman and rested his head against his backpack until he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Carter and Oosterbroek joined Abdul Shariff, the Associated Press photographer who died on 9 January 1994 after he was killed in a cross fire while covering an African National Congress (ANC) delegation in the township of Katlehong near Johannesburg.
Carter left a suicide note that read: "I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist...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... I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."