Famine in Sudan
During the 1990's, a combination of drought, civil war, and general poverty made the famine in Sudan a systematic killer. Carter, a South African photojournalist, had traveled to Sudan with the intent of journaling the rebel movement, but was instead struck by the devastation of the famine and began to photograph the victims of starvation. While traveling near a village in Southern Sudan, the sounds of whimpering brought him to face an emaciated toddler trying to crawl to a feeding centre. Her path was being calculatingly followed by a vulture, which was strikingly well-nourished in contrast to the hunched figure in the foreground. The picture is haunting, almost surreal in its barren landscape.
The vulture is unblinking in its gaze on the child, the girl's eyes are unseen, focused on the ground, and the viewer is torn between one and the other and the implied relationship between the ground, the vulture, the child and themselves. It is a difficult picture to ignore and as the cliché is appropriate, a picture that is impossible to forget.
After taking the photograph Carter sat under a tree and sobbed. No one knows what happened to the girl. But why didn't Carter help the girl?
That's the question everyone would be asking. Carter had been traveling in Sudan through war ravaged terrain for several weeks and while traveling he had witnessed the world's most dire situations. There were many people dying out of famine. That is the reason why this didn't make much difference to him. He was painfully aware of the fact that he could not help those people as he is not an aid worker. It was a situation where the photographer had to choose between a photograph and a life. The person who intervenes cannot record, and the person who records cannot intervene. He helped himself to escape through the loophole of journalistic authenticity.
When Carter came across both the young girl and the vulture, he had to make the decision that this was something worth photographing. As a journalist, his focus was on an audience and readership outside Sudan, most of whom would never see the picture. This picture was intended to create an emotionally battering response among the intellectuals, but ignorant, first-world public to the Sudanese crisis. This was the photograph that was going to spark media attention and make headway in bringing the global eye to rest upon this small, dry part of the world. Kevin Carter wanted to make people cry.
On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to a river, an area he used to play in as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck's exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. Carter's suicide note read: "I am 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.
In conclusion, famine is a condition which is still persisting in the least developed countries or developing countries.
We should take some steps to prevent this from persisting. We can only overcome this problem by increasing the level of awareness towards the inequality and famine persisting in many countries.
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