Kevin c

Sean Thomas Dougherty Killing the Messenger
"For the Egyptians, the vulture was a mother-symbol, probably because it devours corpses; it also stood for the means whereby Hammamit (the universal soul) was split up into separate parts to form individual souls."
— J. E. Cirlot, from A Dictionary of Symbols

I was completing a residency at the Atlantic Center for the arts and one night was doingresearch for a poem on images and artists, surfmg around on the Internet when 1 stumbled upon this photo "showing a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture." Or as the Times wrote, "a vulture coolly eyeing an emaciated Sudanese child struggling toward a feeding station." Or the Columhia fournalism Review's odd description, "a well-fed vulture stalking a starving Sudanese girl."Well-fed? A reaching reference perhaps to what was all around, the common death of a child, the common carnage of vultures eating the dead—that this one moment was just another death among many? No matter the signifying text, the photographic image is a brutal one, the child slumped over hands beneath head in the fetal position, womblike, so vulnerable in the right foreground.The vulture positioned withits folded wings a few feet to the left. And I would agree with the Times' description over the other more dramatic ones: it is the calmness of the vulture which makes it so horrific a photo: the vulture waititij^ for that moment when it will feed. The photo was published around the world in 1994 and won Carter the Puhtzer Prize. He was hailed and celebrated by his professional peers. But unable toaccept that his greatest professional success had come through capturing the image of so much suffering, Carter began to crack. Three months later, he parked his dusty red pickup truck beside the slow-running Braamfonteinspruit river where he played as a child in his native 608

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BECAME INTERESTED in Kevin Carter's story quite by accident.

South Africa, hooked a hose up to the exhaustpipe, got in the seat and waited. The horror of the Sudanese photo had brought not only success to Carter, hut ridicule.The Times wrote, "many people demanded to know what happened to the girl... callers in the middle of the night denounced him. In his last note he wrote/The pain of life overrides thejoy to the point that joy does not exist.'" Carter was found dead of self-induced asphyxiation.Carter's photo of the Sudanese child asks the reader to act. Why then was it met with such critique? The photo or work of art that challenges us often provokes us into empathy. In a world where atrocity has become commonplace, atrocity becomes aesthetic. Carter's photo was appreciated for its power as framed shot. It won him an award. Rhetorically though such photos have perhaps lost—for many—theirpower to cause any change other than to evoke appreciation. But it persuaded me. I could not get the Carter story out of my head, nor the photo of the Sudanese girl. Of course Carter's photo had little pohtical effect. In a world so "compassion-weary" the powers have done nothing. Eleven years after Carter's photo and two years after I first saw
KEVIN CARTER/CORBIS

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THE MASSACHUSETTSREVIEW

it, the Sudan is again (still) m a state of starvation, coupled with a genocidal regime. The Umted States can send 400,000 troops to fight a bogus war in Iraq but does nothing to stop the deadly ethnic cleansing which occurs in the Sudan. What then does the artist have to do when faced with such nonchalant skepticism? In a world where to bear witness still mattered (and here I say it does,but how difficult it can be) if anything should have risen people's consciousness to action it was this photo. The photo is a perfect persuasive frame that challenges the viewer to empathize with the child and ask why she suffers. The photo exists in the present tense. Carter's photo begs the viewer to act.Why then was it met with such public critique as unethical? Because it worked. People...