Pictures worth a 1000 words.

[Louth Exile]

The photographer didn't intervine to save the child. He decided that if he did the photo would lose its impact on people like us. He decided that the life of this child in this photograph would eventually save the life of many others. He was right in that sense as it triggered a huge reaction from the outside world in relation to Sudan saving many lives. The photographer eventually took his own life.

jesus that photo and story would bring a tear to a stone and we think we have problems On a sidenote just wondering have any of ye gone out or know anyone who had gone out on the niall mellon foundation trip to cape town in South Africa ?

I played in a Golf Classic yesterday in aid of someone who is going in November

Same as that, we have a night in our club next weekend for one of the selectors who is going out there

[Hardy]

have any of ye gone out or know anyone who had gone out on the niall mellon foundation trip to cape town in South Africa ?

A friend of mine is going in November too. He's holding a fundraiser tomorrow and I'm going to a football match, which tells you something about my moral compass, I suppose.

You can donate to the Niall Mellon Trust here: http://www.townshiptrust.org.za/index.html

[Homer]

[Puckoon]

That is heartbreaking. Its amazing how we forget our privileged position in the world.

That said - the child didn't need to die for the picture to impact me.

[boojangles]

Some unbelievable Images-Some famous ones such as the student on Tianamen Square.Homer would you know the Background to any of your photos?Im intriqued looking at them.

[Square Ball]

these images had an impact on me.

[Dinny Breen]

[Dinny Breen]

Louis (right) is pictured knocking out Germany's Max Schmeling on 22 June 1938 in New York. With the Second World War just months away, the worldwide significance of this fight cannot be underestimated.

[Dinny Breen]

[Dinny Breen]

Rosa Parks, arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white man

[Dinny Breen]

photographer Margaret Bourke-White was with Gen. George Patton's troops when they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Forty-three thousand people had been murdered there. Patton was so outraged he ordered his men to march German civilians through the camp so they could see with their own eyes what their nation had wrought.

[dodo]

The famous cover of the National Geographic magazine of June 1985 shows an Afghan refugee fleeing the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. The picture is valuable as it vividly demonstrates the genetic imprint of the Aryans who founded Afghanistan 4000 years ago. The girl's eyes are green, her hair light brown and her features almost indistinguishable from modern Europeans which represents the last remaining traces of the Aryans in Afghanistan

[Maguire01]

The photographer didn't intervine to save the child. He decided that if he did the photo would lose its impact on people like us. He decided that the life of this child in this photograph would eventually save the life of many others. He was right in that sense as it triggered a huge reaction from the outside world in relation to Sudan saving many lives. The photographer eventually took his own life.

A bit misleading that post - a quick search on Wikipedia:

The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown.

and...

A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos and then the vulture flew off.

and as for his death, i think people here have assumed it's because he couldn't live with not saving the child.....

On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play 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. Portions of 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."

[gerry]

 

This photograph showing a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture won Kevin Carter the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.
Photographer Haunted by Horror of His Work

Obituary: Kevin Carter 1960 - 1994

Johannesburg - Kevin Carter, the South African photographer whose image of a starving Sudanese toddler stalked by a vulture won him a Pulitzer Prize this year, was found dead on Wednesday night, apparently a suicide, police said yesterday.  He was 33.  The police said Mr Carter's body and several letters to friends and family were discovered in his pick-up truck, parked in a Johannesburg suburb.  An inquest showed that he had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Mr Carter started as a sports photographer in 1983 but soon moved to the front lines of South African political strife, recording images of repression, anti-apartheid protest and fratricidal violence.  A few davs after winning his Pulitzer Prize in April, Mr Carter was nearby when one of his closest friends and professional companions, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township.

Friends said Mr Carter was a man of tumultuous emotions which brought passion to his work but also drove him to extremes of elation and depression.  Last year, saying he needed a break from South Africa's turmoil, he paid his own way to the southern Sudan to photograph a civil war and famine that he felt the world was overlooking.

His picture of an emaciated girl collapsing on the way to a feeding centre, as a plump vulture lurked in the background, was published first in The New York Times and The Mail & Guardian, a Johannesburg weekly.  The reaction to the picture was so strong that The New York Times published an unusual editor's note on the fate of the girl.  Mr Carter said she resumed her trek to the feeding centre.  He chased away the vulture.

Afterwards, he told an interviewer, he sat under a tree for a long time, "smoking cigarettes and crying".  His father, Mr Jimmy Carter laid last night: "Kevin always carried around the horror of the work he did." - The New York Times

[muppet]

Enough tear jerkers. I was in the States for 911. Every news report had a story about orphaned kids whose parents didn't come home. It became the only news for days. I dont watch TV any more as a result. Bad things happen. My spending my life agonising over them wont achieve anything. Carter's death achieved nothing other than the loss of a man who could capture an entire planet's shame in one photo.

So something less profound but important nonetheless: