Sep. 12, 1994: Press:Life and Death of Kevin Carter
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<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
Sep. 12, 1994 Revenge of the Killer Microbes
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
PRESS, Page 70
The Life and Death of Kevin Carter
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<body>
<p> Visiting Sudan, a little-known photographer took a picture that
made the world weep. What happened afterward is a tragedy of
another sort.
</p>
<p>By Scott MacLeod/Johannesburg
</p>
<p> The image presaged no celebration: a child barely alive, a vulture
so eager for carrion. Yet the photograph that epitomized Sudan's
famine would win Kevin Carter fame--and hopes for anchoring
a career spent hounding the news, free-lancing in war zones,
waiting anxiously for assignments amid dire finances, staying
in the line of fire for that one great picture. On May 23, 14
months after capturing that memorable scene, Carter walked up
to the dais in the classical rotunda of Columbia University's
Low Memorial Library and received the Pulitzer Prize for feature
photography. The South African soaked up the attention. "I swear
I got the most applause of anybody," Carter wrote back to his
parents in Johannesburg. "I can't wait to show you the trophy.
It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgment
of my work I could receive."
</p>
<p> Carter was feted at some of the most fashionable spots in New
York City. Restaurant patrons, overhearing his claim to fame,
would come up and ask for his autograph. Photo editors at the
major magazines wanted to meet the new hotshot, dressed in his
black jeans and T shirts, with the tribal bracelets and diamond-stud
earring, with the war-weary eyes and tales from the front lines
of Nelson Mandela's new South Africa. Carter signed with Sygma,
a prestigious picture agency representing 200 of the world's
best photojournalists. "It can be a very glamorous business,"
says Sygma's U.S. director, Eliane Laffont. "It's very hard
to make it, but Kevin is one of the few who really broke through.
The pretty girls were falling for him, and everybody wanted
to hear what he had to say."
</p>
<p> There would be little time for that. Two months after receiving
his Pulitzer, Carter would be dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning
in Johannesburg, a suicide at 33. His red pickup truck was parked
near a small river where he used to play as a child; a green
garden hose attached to the vehicle's exhaust funneled the fumes
inside. "I'm really, really sorry," he explained in a note left
on the passenger seat beneath a knapsack. "The pain of life
overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist."
</p>
<p> How could a man who had moved so many people with his work end
up a suicide so soon after his great triumph? The brief obituaries
that appeared around the world suggested a morality tale about
a person undone by the curse of fame. The details, however,
show how fame was only the final, dramatic sting of a death
foretold by Carter's personality, the pressure to be first where
the action is, the fear that his pictures were never good enough,
the existential lucidity that came to him from surviving violence
again and again--and the drugs he used to banish that lucidity.
If there is a paramount lesson to be drawn from Carter's meteoric
rise and fall, it is that tragedy does not always have heroic
dimensions. "I have always had it all at my feet," read the
last words of his suicide note, "but being me just fit up anyway."
</p>
<p> First, there was history. Kevin Carter was born in 1960, the
year Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was outlawed.
Descended from English immigrants, Carter was not part of the
Afrikaner mainstream that ruled the country. Indeed, its ideology
appalled him. Yet he was caught up in its historic misadventure.
</p>
<p> His devoutly Roman Catholic parents, Jimmy and Roma, lived in
Parkmore, a tree-lined Johannesburg suburb--and they accepted
apartheid. Kevin, however, like many of his generation, soon
began to question it openly. "The police used to go around arresting
black people for not carrying their passes," his mother recalls.
"They used to treat them very badly, and we felt unable to do
anything about it. But Kevin got very angry about it. He used
to have arguments with his father. `Why couldn't we do something
about it? Why didn't we go shout at those police?'"
</p>
<p> Though Carter insisted he loved his parents, he told his closest
friends his childhood was unhappy. As a teenager, he found his
thrills riding motorcycles and fantasized about becoming a race-car
driver. After graduating from a Catholic boarding school in
Pretoria in 1976, Carter studied pharmacy before dropping out
with bad grades a year later. Without a student deferment, he
was conscripted into the South African Defense Force, where
he found upholding the apartheid regime loathsome. Once, after
he took the side of a black mess-hall waiter, some Afrikaans-speaking
soldiers called him a kaffir-boetie ("nigger lover") and beat
him up. In 1980 Carter went absent without leave, rode a motorcycle
to Durban and, calling himself David, became a disk jockey.
He longed to see his family but felt too ashamed to return.
One day after he lost his job, he swallowed scores of sleeping
pills, pain-killers and rat poison. He survived. He returned
to the S.A.D.F. to finish his service and was injured in 1983
while on guard duty at air force headquarters in Pretoria. A
bomb attributed to the A.N.C. had exploded, killing 19 people.
After leaving the service, Carter got a job at a camera supply
shop and drifted into journalism, first as a weekend sports
photographer for the Johannesburg Sunday Express. When riots
began sweeping the black townships in 1984, Carter moved to
the Johannesburg Star and aligned himself with the crop of young,
white photojournalists who wanted to expose the brutality of
apartheid--a mission that had once been the almost exclusive
calling of South Africa's black photographers. "They put themselves
in face of danger, were arrested numerous times, but never quit.
They literally were willing to sacrifice themselves for what
they believed in," says American photojournalist James Nachtwey,
who frequently worked with Carter and his friends. By 1990,
civil war was raging between Mandela's A.N.C. and the Zulu-supported
Inkatha Freedom Party. For whites, it became potentially fatal
to work the townships alone. To diminish the dangers, Carter
hooked up with three friends--Ken Oosterbroek of the Star
and free-lancers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva--and they
began moving through Soweto and Tokoza at dawn. If a murderous
gang was going to shoot up a bus, throw someone off a train
or cut up somebody on the street, it was most likely to happen
as township dwellers began their journeys to work in the soft,
shadowy light of an African morning. The four became so well
known for capturing the violence that Living, a Johannesburg
magazine, dubbed them "the Bang-Bang Club."
</p>
<p> Even with the teamwork, however, cruising the townships was
often a perilous affair. Well-armed government security forces
used excessive firepower. The chaotic hand-to-hand street fighting
between black factions involved AK-47s, spears and axes. "At
a funeral some mourners caught one guy, hacked him, shot him,
ran over him with a car and set him on fire," says Silva, describing
a typical encounter. "My first photo showed this guy on the
ground as the crowd told him they were going to kill him. We
were lucky to get away."
</p>
<p> Sometimes it took more than a camera and camaraderie to get
through the work. Marijuana, known locally as dagga, is widely
available in South Africa. Carter and many other photojournalists
smoked it habitually in the townships, partly to relieve tension
and partly to bond with gun-toting street warriors. Although
he denied it, Carter, like many hard-core dagga users, moved
on to something more dangerous: smoking the "white pipe," a
mixture of dagga and Mandrax, a banned tranquilizer containing
methaqualone. It provides an intense, immediate kick and then
allows the user to mellow out for an hour or two.
</p>
<p> By 1991, working on the dawn patrol had paid off for one of
the Bang-Bang Club. Marinovich won a Pulitzer for his September
1990 photographs of a Zulu being stabbed to death by A.N.C.
supporters. That prize raised the stakes for the rest of the
club--especially Carter. And for Carter other comparisons
cropped up. Though Oosterbroek was his best friend, they were,
according to Nachtwey, "like the polarities of personality types.
Ken was the successful photographer with the loving wife. His
life was in order." Carter had bounced from romance to romance,
fathering a daughter out of wedlock. In 1993 Carter headed north
of the border with Silva to photograph the rebel movement in
famine-stricken Sudan. To make the trip, Carter had taken a
leave from the Weekly Mail and borrowed money for the air fare.
Immediately after their plane touched down in the village of
Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking
relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death,
he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched
whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the
feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture
landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned
himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited
about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings.
It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the
bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle.
Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God
and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He
kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter."
</p>
<p> After another day in Sudan, Carter returned to Johannesburg.
Coincidentally, the New York Times, which was looking for pictures
of Sudan, bought his photograph and ran it on March 26, 1993.
The picture immediately became an icon of Africa's anguish.
Hundreds of people wrote and called the Times asking what had
happened to the child (the paper reported that it was not known
whether she reached the feeding center); and papers around the
world reproduced the photo. Friends and colleagues complimented
Carter on his feat. His self-confidence climbed.
</p>
<p> Carter quit the Weekly Mail and became a free-lance photojournalist--an alluring but financially risky way of making a living,
providing no job security, no health insurance and no death
benefits. He eventually signed up with the Reuter news agency
for a guarantee of roughly $2,000 a month and began to lay plans
for covering his country's first multiracial elections in April.
The next few weeks, however, would bring depression and self-doubt,
only momentarily interrupted by triumph.
</p>
<p> The troubles started on March 11. Carter was covering the unsuccessful
invasion of Bophuthatswana by white right-wing vigilantes intent
on propping up a black homeland, a showcase of apartheid. Carter
found himself just feet away from the summary execution of right-wingers
by a black "Bop" policeman. "Lying in the middle of the gunfight,"
he said, "I was wondering about which millisecond next I was
going to die, about putting something on film they could use
as my last picture."
</p>
<p> His pictures would eventually be splashed across front pages
around the world, but he came away from the scene in a funk.
First, there was the horror of having witnessed murder. Perhaps
as importantly, while a few colleagues had framed the scene
perfectly, Carter was reloading his camera with film just as
the executions took place. "I knew I had missed this f***
shot," he said subsequently. "I drank a bottle of bourbon that
night."
</p>
<p> At the same time, he seemed to be stepping up his drug habit,
including smoking the white pipe. A week after the Bop executions,
he was seen staggering around while on assignment at a Mandela
rally in Johannesburg. Later he crashed his car into a suburban
house and was thrown in jail for 10 hours on suspicion of drunken
driving. His superior at Reuter was furious at having to go
to the police station to recover Carter's film of the Mandela
event. Carter's girlfriend, Kathy Davidson, a schoolteacher,
was even more upset. Drugs had become a growing issue in their
one-year relationship. Over Easter, she asked Carter to move
out until he cleaned up his life.
</p>
<p> With only weeks to go before the elections, Carter's job at
Reuter was shaky, his love life was in jeopardy and he was scrambling
to find a new place to live. And then, on April 12, 1994, the
New York Times phoned to tell him he had won the Pulitzer. As
jubilant Times foreign picture editor Nancy Buirski gave him
the news, Carter found himself rambling on about his personal
problems. "Kevin!" she interrupted, "You've just won a Pulitzer!
These things aren't going to be that important now."
</p>
<p> Early on Monday, April 18, the Bang-Bang Club headed out to
Tokoza township, 10 miles from downtown Johannesburg, to cover
an outbreak of violence. Shortly before noon, with the sun too
bright for taking good pictures, Carter returned to the city.
Then on the radio he heard that his best friend, Oosterbroek,
had been killed in Tokoza. Marinovich had been gravely wounded.
Oosterbroek's death devastated Carter, and he returned to work
in Tokoza the next day, even though the violence had escalated.
He later told friends that he and not Ken "should have taken
the bullet."
</p>
<p> New York was a respite. By all accounts, Carter made the most
of his first visit to Manhattan. The Times flew him in and put
him up at the Marriott Marquis just off Times Square. His spirits
soaring, he took to calling New York "my town."
</p>
<p> With the Pulitzer, however, he had to deal not only with acclaim
but also with the critical focus that comes with fame. Some
journalists in South Africa called his prize a "fluke," alleging
that he had somehow set up the tableau. Others questioned his
ethics. "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame
of her suffering," said the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times,
"might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."
Even some of Carter's friends wondered aloud why he had not
helped the girl.
</p>
<p> Carter was painfully aware of the photojournalist's dilemma.
"I had to think visually," he said once, describing a shoot-out.
"I am zooming in on a tight shot of the dead guy and a splash
of red. Going into his khaki uniform in a pool of blood in the
sand. The dead man's face is slightly gray. You are making a
visual here. But inside something is screaming, `My God.' But
it is time to work. Deal with the rest later. If you can't do
it, get out of the game." Says Nachtwey, "Every photographer
who has been involved in these stories has been affected. You
become changed forever. Nobody does this kind of work to make
themselves feel good. It is very hard to continue."
</p>
<p> Carter did not look forward to going home. Summer was just beginning
in New York, but late June was still winter in South Africa,
and Carter became depressed almost as soon as he got off the
plane. "Joburg is dry and brown and cold and dead, and so damn
full of bad memories and absent friends," he wrote in a letter
never mailed to a friend, Esquire picture editor Marianne Butler
in New York.
</p>
<p> Nevertheless, Carter carefully listed story ideas and faxed
some of them off to Sygma. Work did not proceed smoothly. Though
it was not his fault, Carter felt guilty when a bureaucratic
foul-up caused the cancellation of an interview by a writer
from Parade magazine, a Sygma client, with Mandela in Cape Town.
Then came an even more unpleasant experience. Sygma told Carter
to stay in Cape Town and cover French President Francois Mitterrand's
state visit to South Africa. The story was spot news, but according
to editors at Sygma's Paris office, Carter shipped his film
too late to be of use. In any case, they complained, the quality
of the photos was too poor to offer to Sygma's clients.
</p>
<p> According to friends, Carter began talking openly about suicide.
Part of his anxiety was over the Mitterrand assignment. But
mostly he seemed worried about money and making ends meet. When
an assignment in Mozambique for TIME came his way, he eagerly
accepted. Despite setting three alarm clocks to make his early-morning
flight on July 20, he missed the plane. Furthermore, after six
days in Mozambique, he walked off his return flight to Johannesburg,
leaving a package of undeveloped film on his seat. He realized
his mistake when he arrived at a friend's house. He raced back
to the airport but failed to turn up anything. Carter was distraught
and returned to the friend's house in the morning, threatening
to smoke a white pipe and gas himself to death.
</p>
<p> Carter and a friend, Judith Matloff, 36, an American correspondent
for Reuter, dined on Mozambican prawns he had brought back.
He was apparently too ashamed to tell her about the lost film.
Instead they discussed their futures. Carter proposed forming
a writer-photographer free-lance team and traveling Africa together.
</p>
<p> On the morning of Wednesday, July 27, the last day of his life,
Carter appeared cheerful. He remained in bed until nearly noon
and then went to drop off a picture that had been requested
by the Weekly Mail. In the paper's newsroom, he poured out his
anguish to former colleagues, one of whom gave him the number
of a therapist and urged him to phone her.
</p>
<p> The last person to see Carter alive, it seems, was Oosterbroek's
widow, Monica. As night fell, Carter turned up unannounced at
her home to vent his troubles. Still recovering from her husband's
death three months earlier, she was in little condition to offer
counsel. They parted at about 5:30 p.m.
</p>
<p> The Braamfonteinspruit is a small river that cuts southward
through Johannesburg's northern suburbs--and through Parkmore,
where the Carters once lived. At around 9 p.m., Kevin Carter
backed his red Nissan pickup truck against a blue gum tree at
the Field and Study Center. He had played there often as a little
boy. The Sandton Bird Club was having its monthly meeting there,
but nobody saw Carter as he used silver gaffer tape to attach
a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and run it to the passenger-side
window. Wearing unwashed Lee jeans and an Esquire T shirt, he
got in and switched on the engine. Then he put music on his
Walkman and lay over on his side, using the knapsack as a pillow.
</p>
<p> The suicide note he left behind is a litany of nightmares and
dark visions, a clutching attempt at autobiography, self-analysis,
explanation, excuse. After coming home from New York, he wrote,
he was "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..." And then
this: "I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."
