"I'm sorry I didn't pick the child up"

April 28, 2011

April 28, 2011, my brother and I venture out to the NEWSEUM in Washington D.C. 

The Newseum boasts of being the most interactive museum in D.C. ... I'm not a big museum person, but it seems to be one of the things to do when visiting the Capital City. Amongst all the other museums that I've visited  here, I think I enjoyed this the most. A few things definitely made and impact on me in this visit. If you ever get a chance to visit D.C., I'd highly recommend it...http://www.newseum.org/

On the first floor of this 6 level assemblage lay the Pulitzer Prize Photographs exhibit. This one stuck in my head and still bothers me to this day. The photographs shown in these exhibits tell stories of a photo journalists experience, emotion, and convictions, that affect them and their viewers to their very core. Amongst the colors, amazing scenery, and life, that jump out at you though those wonderful photographs, this disturbingly morbid, and somber picture caught my attention. Below is the photo and write up of the history of  the image.

In March 1993, photographer Kevin Carter made a trip to southern Sudan, where he took now iconic photo of a vulture preying upon an emaciated Sudanese toddler near the village of Ayod. Carter said he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. (The parents of the girl were busy taking food from the same UN plane Carter took to Ayod).

The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993 as ‘metaphor for Africa’s despair’. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run an unusual special editor’s note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. Journalists in the Sudan were told not to touch the famine victims, because of the risk of transmitting disease, but Carter came under criticism for not helping the girl. ”The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,” read one editorial.

Carter eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, but he couldn’t enjoy it. “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t pick the child up,” he confided in a friend. Consumed with the violence he’d witnessed, and haunted by the questions as to the little girl’s fate, he committed suicide three months later.


I've seen a lot of brutally disturbing photographs and images throughout my life, but this particular one will probably be one of the most "memorable" ones. 

"If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture" - Eddie Adams

I walked out of the museum that day with a better sense of awareness of the reality of what goes on throughout our planet. I asked the question, " Should I have been in Carter's situation, would I have picked up the kid?". It's easy to say "yes" in hind sight, but if I was there, and I was the one doing my job as a photographer following certain protocols, I would have to say that that decision may have been hard to make. I do know however, that I too would've been left in despair for the rest of my life if I had not picked the child up. 

We are all broken people. Some are fortunate to be blessed with plenty. Some seem to struggle finding a means to provide for the next meal. In either case, we are all faced with this ordeal each and every day of our ordinary lives. 


We have the chance to make a difference whether out in the deserts of Sudan, the jungles of Asia, or in the great cement cities of the West... We can pickup the child... We don't have to live in despair. And we can do it now, wherever we are...

Kevin Carter took a photograph which lead to his suicide in 1993. Little did he know that that photo would affect thousands, if not millions of lives, hopefully for the better...