Kevin Carter's Vulture Photo: The Story of the Child in Sudan

The photograph shows a small, starving child folded over on dry ground in southern Sudan, with a vulture standing a few metres behind. South African photojournalist Kevin Carter took it in March 1993 near the village of Ayod, during a famine caused largely by civil war. Published by The New York Times on 26 March 1993, it became one of the most recognised images of hunger ever made and won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Carter died by suicide four months later, aged 33. Years afterwards, the child was identified as a boy named Kong Nyong, who survived the famine.

Here is what is known about the picture, the man who took it, the criticism it drew and the questions it still raises about photographing suffering.

Who Kevin Carter was

Kevin Carter, South African photojournalist (1960–1994)

Kevin Carter was born in Johannesburg on 13 September 1960. After military service he worked in a photographic supply shop, where he met press photographers and picked up his first assignments, covering weekend sport for the Johannesburg Sunday Express. In 1984 he joined The Star in Johannesburg, determined to document the violence of apartheid.

He became one of four young photographers working in the townships in the early 1990s who were nicknamed the Bang-Bang Club, together with Greg Marinovich, João Silva and Ken Oosterbroek. Their work exposed the brutal fighting in the years before South Africa's first democratic election, and it took a heavy personal toll on all of them. In the mid-1980s Carter had been the first photographer to capture a public "necklacing" killing, an image that stayed with him.

How the photo was taken in Ayod, March 1993

In March 1993 Carter and João Silva flew into southern Sudan on a UN light plane at the invitation of Operation Lifeline Sudan, a relief effort that wanted the world to see the famine. Ayod sat in an area that aid workers called the "Hunger Triangle". At the start of that year an estimated 40 percent of children under five there were malnourished, and between ten and thirteen adults were dying of starvation every day in Ayod alone.

Carter came across the child resting on the way to a feeding centre about half a mile away. A vulture landed nearby. According to Time magazine's 1994 account, he waited about 20 minutes hoping the bird would spread its wings, took his pictures, chased the vulture away and watched the child continue towards the centre. Journalists in Sudan had been told not to touch famine victims because of the risk of spreading disease. Silva later said Carter was badly shaken and kept talking about wanting to hug his own daughter.

Publication, the Pulitzer and the backlash

The New York Times ran the photograph on 26 March 1993 alongside a report by Donatella Lorch, describing the child as a little girl who had collapsed on the trail to a feeding centre. Readers wrote and phoned in large numbers to ask what had happened to her. On 30 March the paper published an editor's note saying the photographer reported that the child recovered enough to keep walking, but that it was not known whether she reached the centre.

In April 1994 the image won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Praise came with fierce criticism. Many people asked why Carter had not simply picked the child up and carried her. Florida's St. Petersburg Times wrote that the man adjusting his lens to get the right frame "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene".

The criticism was understandable, but the circumstances were more complicated than the single frame suggests. The child was close to a feeding station run by aid workers, photographers were on a short visit with strict instructions, and the purpose of the trip was to draw international attention and money to a famine that had been largely ignored. The picture did exactly that.

Detail of the photograph: the child, later identified as Kong Nyong, near the feeding centre in Ayod

The child's identity: Kong Nyong

For years the child was described as a girl, and her fate was unknown, which added to the anger directed at Carter. In 2011 the child's father told a visiting journalist that the child was in fact his son, Kong Nyong, and that he had been cared for at the UN feeding station and survived. A plastic band visible on the child's wrist has been widely reported to be a feeding-centre tag, which would fit with his having been registered for food aid. According to his family, Kong Nyong died around 2007 of fevers.

Carter's death in July 1994

The months after the photograph were the hardest of Carter's life. On 18 April 1994, during clashes in Thokoza township, his closest friend Ken Oosterbroek was shot dead. Carter travelled to New York to receive the Pulitzer, but back home he struggled with depression, debt and the memories of what he had seen.

On 27 July 1994 he took his own life near the Johannesburg suburb of Parkmore, where he had played as a child. He was 33. In the note he left, he wrote about money troubles and his daughter, and said, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain".

It would be wrong to say the photo killed him. People who knew him describe years of trauma, grief and personal difficulty, of which the backlash was only one part. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or to a local crisis line; in the US you can call or text 988, and in the UK and Ireland the Samaritans are on 116 123.

Why the image still matters

Carter's photograph sits at the centre of a lasting debate about photojournalism: is the job to intervene or to bear witness, and what do photographers owe the people in their pictures? Susan Sontag explored these questions in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), and Desmond Tutu, in a foreword to the Bang-Bang Club's memoir, reminded readers that these photographers were human beings working in brutal conditions.

Carter's story has been told in the book The Bang-Bang Club (2000) by Greg Marinovich and João Silva, a 2010 film of the same name in which Taylor Kitsch played Carter, an HBO documentary, The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, and the 1996 Manic Street Preachers song "Kevin Carter".

The famine itself is easy to lose behind the controversy. Behind the frame were thousands of families in southern Sudan, which became the independent state of South Sudan in 2011, and aid workers trying to keep them alive. The picture worked because it made distant suffering impossible to ignore, and the uneasy questions it raises are part of why it is still studied today.

Sources: Wikipedia: The Vulture and the Little Girl; Wikipedia: Kevin Carter; Time: The Life and Death of Kevin Carter (Scott Macleod, 12 September 1994); Wikipedia: The Bang-Bang Club. Photographs: Kevin Carter.