A couple weeks ago we were talking in class about ethics… about how far is too far, what should and should not be published, what is right and what is wrong.

As a photographer, as a photojournalist, we owe people the truth. Fair enough. As a human being, most of us believe that helping others is an important thing. Morals… ethics… where does it all fit?

Kevin Carter, a famous photojournalist, made a wrong decision.

I don’t know if any of you have heard of him. Here is the story.

Carter, among many others, traveled to Sudan, Africa to capture the many horredous things that were going on during the famine in 1994. He took a photo… a Pulitzer Prize photo, one that made him famous. Just like Stanley Forman in Boston in the 70’s.

This, however, should be taken differently.

He took the photo below: a little girl crawling towards a UN refugee camp, a place where there was food. She was struggling to make it, and still had a kilometer to go. On her hands and knees, she tried. Watching her, a vulture, preying on her, waiting for her to die. So he could feed his hunger.

Carter, seeing this stomach-churning image, decided he would capture it on film. He did. He was praised for it, showing the bitter truth of what truly lies beyond the Pacific, the horrors we “Americanized” citizens do not even realize happen.

However, after he took the photo, Carter left. Vanished. Did not think to pick up the little girl, frail bones and all, and help her get to the camp. He LEFT. He argued later that it was because “they told us to be cautious of disease.”

No one, not even Carter, knows what happened to the little girl. She may not have made it two more feet before she lost her life to a bird.

The ironic thing… three months after Carter received the Pulitzer Prize for taking the feature photo, he committed suicide.

He taped the end of a garden hose to the exhauste pipe of his Nissan truck, and ran it up to the passenger window. The note he left behind said something along the lines of feeling “haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain… of starving women and children…” He couldn’t take it.

I guess the point of this is to really address what we as photographers and as journalists, even as everyday people, will perhaps one day see. What do we do? Do we stand there and snap the shot, and run away from death itself? Do we stay, and risk our lives to help others?

Or, do we sit here and talk about it, write about it… and make a solid point.

It makes me sad… but it also makes me want to help, makes me want to do more than I am right now. To the future… we have one.

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