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.” 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.” 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.” 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.” 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.
