‘The Vulture and the Little Girl’ Is One of the Most Shocking Photos Ever Taken

It remains one of the most shocking photographs ever captured, igniting worldwide debates about the ethics of photojournalism. But what is the story behind Kevin Carter’s The Girl and the Vulture?

Carter was part of the Bang-Bang Club, a group of four photographers covering the end of the South African Apartheid in the early 1990s.

But despite the group’s association with South Africa, Carter’s image was in fact taken in Ayod, Sudan, which is now South Sudan. Carter was there with fellow Bang-Bang Club member Joao Silva to document the Sudanese Civil War. The pair traveled to a dangerous rebel-held area that was suffering severe famine in March, 1993.

Flying in on an aid plane, the experienced photojournalists were shocked by what they saw. Starving children and ragged villagers who were desperate to get their hands on food and supplies. No NGOs had been to Ayod for months.

“Man, you won’t believe what I’ve just shot,” Carter told Silva after the pair had met up again in an aid tent. “I was shooting this kid on her knees, and suddenly there was this vulture right behind her.”

Those quotes come from the famous book titled The Bang-Bang Club, authored by Silva and Greg Marinovich. Carter told Silva that he had chased the vulture away, the former disappointed that he had not gotten that shot himself.

Carter’s photo was published by The New York Times soon afterward, prompting an avalanche of questions from readers who demanded to know the fate of the girl. So strong was the questioning that the Times attached an editor’s note to the photo.

“A picture last Friday with an article about the Sudan showed a little Sudanese girl who had collapsed from hunger on the trail to a feeding center in Ayod. A vulture lurked behind her,” it reads.

“Many readers have asked about the fate of the girl. The photographer reports that she recovered enough to resume her trek after the vulture was chased away. It is not known whether she reached the center.”

Impact

Carter and The New York Times won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. By then, the image had caused a sensation, sparking donations to aid organizations in Sudan and appearing in newspapers and magazines around the globe.

Unfortunately, Carter was in a bad spot personally. According to The Bang-Bang Club, he was using drugs often and could barely register the enormity of having won the Pulitzer Prize.

Adding to his issues were incessant questions about the child’s fate, questions that he simply couldn’t answer properly. People kept asking why he hadn’t picked her up after he had taken the photo.

“The bottom line was that Lifeline Sudan had not flown in Kevin and Joao to pick up or feed children — they were flown in to show the worst of the famine and the war, to generate publicity — but the questions remained,” Marinovich writes.

In July 1994, a little over a year after taking the photo, Carter died by suicide. After his death, a Japanese person wrote to local newspaper Asahi Shimbun with the following letter.

“I can hardly believe that I was the only person who felt it too harsh to criticize Mr. Carter for not having saved the girl before taking the picture,” they wrote.

“I cannot stop praying that Mr. Carter have a peaceful mind in the heaven. He left us with a picture that exposed us to a scene that is too sad to be passed by.”