A pic to die for

Ana Sofía Piña de los Reyes

"The Vulture"- Kevin Carter 

“I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain.”

The vulture and the little girl, which, as a matter of fact, was actually a boy; is a photograph that was published in The New York Times, taken by the SouthAfrican reporter, Kevin Carter. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography award in 1994 and was chosen as Picture of the Year by The American Magazine.

He described it as a "metaphor for Africa's despair". The New York Times was contacted by several hundred people to ask if the child had survived. Carter was accused of inhumanity in not helping the child and leaving her vulnerable to attack. The criticism grew when Carter was awarded with the Pulitzer prize for the photograph.

«This is my most successful image after 10 years of taking pictures, but I do not hang it on my wall. I hate it. I still regret not having helped the girl » said Kevin while receiving the prize 1994.

The author  committed suicide weeks after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Public opinion understood the photo as an allegory of what was happening in Sudan: Kong was the problem of hunger and poverty, the vulture was capitalism and Carter was the indifference of the rest of society. The criticism came against him and tried to justify himself, claiming that the child was dying and that the tribe was about 20 meters from it and that the animal waited for its food ration, besides the fact that they were told not to have physical contact with any person because of the malaria.