The Tragic Tale of The Photograph that Killed it's Photographer - Kevin Carter

foreign [Music] photographs can be revealing things they can reveal Beauty they can reveal tragedy they can capture your first day or they can capture your best day and they can capture your worst day they can reveal your sadness your joy your anger photographs can capture your perspective or someone else's some cultures around the world believe that photographs steal your soul I think there's some truth to the idea that photographs steal your soul the question is when photographing something frightening or horrifying whose Soul does the photo steal [Music] suddenly feelings of hatred for the police boil over foreign starts when a police Land Rover is trapped in the crowd who begin to kick and stone it then the police opened fire with shotguns [Music] people on the move what's actually happening in these circumstances one of the key to apartheid strategy is the group areas act which delineates in the country the places where white people black people colored people Asian people can live and often we get people living in areas which according to the group areas act they shouldn't be living from the truck as it went down the road away from it towards the group of kids on the corner then the truck turned around and came back as they did so there were several policemen in the back of the truck hiding in boxes and they popped up oh this is the world that many people of South Africa grew up in conflict exploitation inequality South Africa is a place which was socially and financially ripped apart by colonialism from Europe the European habit of enforced slavery of indigenous Africans was also found in South Africa slavery is an issue which shaped Africa as a continent in general and many of its issues can be traced back to it Dutch settlers needed workers and the slavery was a standard practice back then they simply had slaves to work their property and businesses some of these slaves were from South Africa itself and some were from neighboring states the one thing they had in common was the slaves were not white or european slaves were not allowed to leave their place of employment without a pass they were badly fed overcrowded physically punished and not allowed to marry if they did have children those children became property of the slave owners as well and were also put into permanent slavery when slavery was eventually abolished settled Farmers left the country as it was no longer profitable without slave labor one particular consumer good from Europe became a widely used tool in South Africa guns [Music] the introduction of guns enabled nefarious indigenous people selected by former slave owners to become the new slave masters by proxy the discovery that South Africa was rich in diamonds and gold led to the British Empire becoming interested in the area and British forces entered and conquered the local people so as to extract the resources for the next few decades after this it would become a sovereign state but one with remnants of Prior colonial rule running through its veins namely the idea that people of color were inferior to their white European counterparts for what I hope are obvious reasons this led to massive Civil War as ordinary hard-working Africans oppose the government and tried to obtain the same rights and legal protections as their settler citizens during the 80s the South African government dispatched death squads to literally roam the streets and murder anyone who disagreed with their law and Rule Kevin Carter was born in Johannesburg and grew up during this very disturbing time in South African history he was born into a middle-class neighborhood which was classified as whites only he would on occasion as a child see police arresting black people who entered the area and would question his parents on why they a Catholic liberal family simply accepted this as just and fair After High School Carter stood in to be a pharmacist but dropped out and was drafted into the military to escape service into a regime which regularly executed black people for not agreeing with white rule he enlisted in the Air Force instead he served four years during service he witnessed fellow women insulting a black mess hall waiter and decided to defend a waiter The Omen then beat Carter badly for standing up for the black waiter following this he went AWOL and tried to become a radio DJ before being discovered and returned to mandatory military service in 1983 he witnessed the Church Street bombing in Pretoria and this prompted a new career change seeing the bombing in the very one-sided media coverage of it had made Carter realize that there was a side of these stories which went Untold he decided to become a photojournalist in order to tell the side which was often left out his work focused on the brutality of the apartheid regime of South Africa while the national media focused mostly on a very edited version of events in which black people were shown assaulting police and engaging in violence Carter would expose why those people were so angry he would show the cruelty and torture enacted against him which had prompted them to defend themselves but he would also expose how the responses to apartheid were equally brutal a particularly brutal punishment was reserved for people who were collaborators or informers to the apartheid regime it was called necklacing they would force a car tire over someone's head and trap their arms inside it they'd then fill it with petrol and set it on fire Karcher was the first person in the world to photograph this practice and showed just how cruel it was photographing this was the first of many things which would take a heavy emotional toll on Carter with him later questioning whether he should be photographing things like this one part of him thought that photographing this would expose the extreme violence of South Africa to the world and perhaps help encourage other world leaders to pressure South Africa into ending segregation I was appalled at what they were doing I was appalled at what I was doing but then people started talking about those pictures then I felt maybe my actions hadn't been all that bad the other part of him wondered if perhaps the very fact that media covered such horrifying Acts was the point of the ACT the acts didn't carry the same violent message to his detractors if the media didn't amplify it after having seen so many necklacings on the news it occurred to me that either many others were being performed off camera as it were and this was just the tip of the iceberg or that the presence of the camera completed the last requirement and acted as a catalyst in this terrible reaction the strong message that was being sent was only meaningful if it were carried by the media it was not more about the warning of others than about causing one person pain question that haunts me is would those people have been necklaced if there was no media coverage it's easy to understand how one might feel conflicted about what you do when it involves suffering like this over the years Carter would visit many African War zones to photograph the struggles of the people there and the violence that followed the continent's fractured politics one country in particular would come to way very heavily on Carter's conscience [Music] is an African nation situated close to the Middle East though not divided by borders it has long since been considered to be divided into North and South due to the influence of Islam and British colonization it's a country which has been ravaged by War and Conflict for almost its entire existence the central government of Sudan is a Sharia Muslim World which originally just controlled the Northern parts of Sudan after Egypt had invaded and conquered it in the 1800s with the South being a collection of independent localities the central government of the north has attempted throughout history to expand its influence and rule over the South to bring it under Sharia Muslim rule the British colonization of South Sudan prevented that from happening as they controlled South Sudan and made an agreement with the north that the whole of Sudan would be ruled by an Egyptian appointed and British endorsed governor in return North Sudan and Egypt would make no attempts to enforce rule or law which British did not agree to upon the South over time and due to Great resistance from the north the United Kingdom agreed to integrate the two areas and Arabic was made the language of the administration and by default the national language the Sudanese South had previously spoken English as taught by the colonists and resented the changes that effectively locked them out of government-level discussions and marginalized them in the 1950s British colonial rule of Africa in general was beginning to decline and there was growing support for Sudanese Independence perhaps since in the coming turmoil both the United Kingdom and Egypt allowed both regions of Sudan to have a free Vault on Independence which then passed within 10 years of Independence the first of many military regimes would take over and begin a period of conflict war and Devastation which would last Almost the entirety of Sudan's modern history with most of the regimes wanting to impose harsher and harsher Muslim law upon the South in 1991 the government of Sudan passed a criminal act of 1991 which instated archaic punishments for Crime which included stoning amputations and other excessive means The South was officially exempt from the rule as it was Sharia law which The South was not subject to as many states were not Muslim this was circumvented though when the government swapped Sharia Muslim judges from the north to serve in the South and so while the South was officially exempt from the law judgments passed down by court systems were in line with Sharia law in practice [Music] back in the 80s the Sudan people's Liberation Army or the spla had risen up in response to the military government and had gained control over some parts of Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War in 1989 there had been some level of ceasefire between the government and the spla but by 1992 that ceasefire ended when the Sudanese government stormed southern Sudan and forcibly seized turrets they bribed and paid people in the South to become militia against its own people and villages cities and localities were raided and destroyed with many being killed in the process this constant period of War meant that the people of Sudan were repeatedly without homes and were forced to wander the country to escape the brutal conflict this meant the people never had any time to form the land keep animals or even dig Wells to have clean water in 1993 Decades of fighting had ravaged South Sudan and displaced his people multiple times in 1991 a famine had been avoided in Sudan when the government was finally persuaded by mass citizen pressure to accept aid from the United Nations which also included the U.S and the UK 100 000 tons of food was sent and distributed in both the government-controlled North and the rebel South 1.7 million people were forced to flee from their homes their lives in some cases they had to leave elderly family members behind to starve alone because they couldn't move the country was Awash with Seas of starving men women and children who had nowhere to go in 1993 the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York shook America the investigation into the bombing revealed that some of the bombers had valid Sudanese passports and the U.S then labeled Sudan a state sponsor of terrorist action this made the country immediately ineligible for many forms of non-emergency U.S assistance the us as a result pulled most of the support which had been given previously the continued displacement and the withdrawal of Aid was a deadly combo which led to one of the worst famines in African history the video has been shown on screen now are actually from another famine in 1998. the reason why I can't show you images from the 93 famine is because at the time there was a block on foreign people and entities entering the country the government of Sudan banned the existing judicial system and replaced it with one which only ever defended government action the media was heavily restricted and censored to make sure that the crisis was hidden from external View and unpublicized while simultaneously projecting an image of a kind government which was caring for its people amid terrorist uprising Aid workers U.N inspectors journalists and military personnel were repeatedly denied visas to enter or their applications were simply permanently delayed in the system those who were awarded visas were done so under the Proviso they not reveal or discuss what they saw while they were there as a result most of the world was largely ignorant of what was happening in South Sudan in March 1993 Robert Hadley of the United Nations was in charge of operation Lifeline Sudan which was the official name for the aid efforts to shoot out he gave an opportunity to photojournalist joao Silva to go to Sudan and report about the famine at the time the UN operation was having funding problems due to some Nations recently pulling all of their aid and funding and Hadley was of the opinion that sending journalists to reveal the extent of the problem would Elevate the issue internationally and help to gain more funding joao was friends with Kevin Carter as they were both part of a photojournalist group called the Bang Bang Club who run South Africa reporting on apartheid violence Silva ask Carter if he wanted to come with him to Sudan Carter accepted they landed in Nairobi where they were told they would remain indefinitely due to the conflict which was very likely just the government attempting to prevent active journalism shortly after the UN received permission from a rebel group to allow food to be delivered to IOD Carter and Silva went with this flight to enter the area of the famine they were shocked by what they saw there the scale of the suffering was overpowering and they would talk daily about the horrors they were seeing it was here the Carter would take this photograph of a young child doubled over by exhaustion caused by extreme starvation and in the background was a hungry vulture waiting for its prey to die so that he could eat it's a powerful and shocking image as Carter pressed the shutter button on the camera and it froze that child and vulture forever in time something a sidecars are shifted a part of him drained the photo would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize and brought Mass International attention to the famine in Sudan thousands of people wrote to the New York Times who published the photo to ask what happened to the child and offer help after taking the photo Carter and silver left diode to another part of Sudan but Carter couldn't stop thinking about the photo he found himself asking if the vulture was in the photo or taking the photo it might be difficult for people to understand but as a photojournalist my first instinct was to make the photograph as soon as that job was done and the child moved on I felt completely devastated I I think I tried to pray I tried to to talk to God um to assure him that he got me out of this place I would always I would change my life for the next year Carter would travel around taking photos of the struggling around Africa but colleagues noticed a change in his behavior he was more withdrawn quiet isolated over the coming months his friends and colleagues saw him less and less until July 27 1994 when Kevin Carter drove his car to the field and study center apart more an area that he used to play in as a child he fixed one end of a horse pipe onto his car exhaust and the other inside his vehicle and ended his own life his final words were scribbled on a piece of paper and revealed a man haunted and tormented by the horrors that he'd photographed whose final Hope was to join a recently deceased colleague I'm really really sorry the pain of Life overrides The Joy to the point the joy does not exist I'm haunted by the Vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain of starving or wounded children of trick or happy Mad Men often police of killer executioners I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky please some cultures of the world refuse to be photographed they believe that a photograph takes more than just an image they believed that a photograph takes your soul this is the story of Kevin Carter and the photograph which killed its photographer [Music]

Channel: Peaked Interest

Views: 22,872

Keywords: kevin carter, peaked interest, moderate interest, mystery, true crime, real life story, cold case, kevin carter manic street preachers, kevin carter nfl, kevin carter guitar, sudan famine 1980s, sudan famine 1998, sudan famine 1984, sudanese famine, south sudan famine, sudan 1993 famine, sourth sudan famine

Id: pHHXXNY_gRY

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022