I Am Only Eight

This is a photo taken by Kevin Carter.

"War doesn't determine who is right, war determines who is left"

A few days ago, I got an email which caught my curiosity. It is a made-up story written by a Taiwanese educator and writer, called “I am only eight.” The story is written by the point of view of an eight-year-old boy in Rwandan where turmoil and destitution is not unexpected. The little boy shows up as a refugee of wars in his country. He loses his parents one after the other in riots. He only has a ten-year-old friend with him on the road to look for other compatriots. Tragedies have not ever stopped on their way. His fellow sufferer died of drinking contaminated river water, leaving the boy alone with a weary and feeble body. An “eagle” which has frightened the boy very much, flies down to him, waiting for its prey dying. Surprisingly, the exhausted boy hears a Jeep coming close. With the hope of being rescued, he sees a man shooting him with a big camera and then driving away without doing anything. He can not make any step further. The only hope in the young mind at that point is to become feelingless before the “eagle” comes to peck him.

The little boy narrated the last paragraph of his life like an onlooker. It sounded too calm to believe that it was he who had undergone all the sufferings. I was not really moved by just reading the story. However, the postscript changed my mind. The short tale was actually an expression of the author’s feelings about a photo. It was a photo taken by a South African photojournalist, Kevin Carter, making him the biggest fame he ever had. In the photo, there were a skinny little body huddling on the ground and a vulture standing near by. No one could look at it without feeling disturbed. Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for this haunting picture. Nevertheless, the Award did not make him any better from the nightmares in the wars where he worked at. Arguments over ethics were raised aloud. Critiques also came with fame. Blames and queries seemed to be overwhelmed the honor. Carter came back to his playground from childhood, and ended his life two months after receiving the Award.

Kevin Carter was a white South African born in 1960, during apartheid was practiced. He had argued with his parents over the unfair treatment of black people since he was very young. He deterred his education because of bad grades and enlisted in South African Defense Force. He was not very happy with the loathsome apartheid regime. Carter later joined a crop of young, white photojournalists after working in a camera supply shop. Their goal was to expose to the brutality of apartheid, which had been an exclusive calling of South African black photographers. Carter and his colleagues put themselves on the most dangerous front. The threatening situation and heart-wrenching views made the mission difficult to get through. That led to the result of using Marijuana or even stronger banned tranquilizers to overcome the tension.

Thereafter, his life was filled with the duties of snapping photos of the violence, and using drugs to ease his nerves. He had work for several leading South African newspapers before Reuters. He experienced not only the horror he was capturing, but also the depression of losing his best friend, Ken Oosterbroek, in a terrible attack in Tokoza. Everyday was like fighting and struggling both in reality and in his mind. As Carter recalled, he found a tiny girl when taking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death. The girl was trying to reach the feeding center. He crouched to photograph her while a vulture landing in the view. He waited for the vulture to spread its wings but it didn’t. After he took pictures of this view, he chased the bird away and watched the girl leaving by herself.

He was informed of the honor of the Pulitzer on April 12, 1994, by the New York Times. However, an award and a big fame did not easily help him get through all the physical and mental problems accompanying him for a long time. The truth was that he got more confused with his career and conscience. People all over the world questioned what had happened to the child. Some photojournalists in South Africa doubted this photo as a fluke. Even some of his friends censured that he had not help the girl.

On July 27, parked aside a river in Johannesburg, he connected a garden host from the exhaust pipe to the passenger-side window of his truck. He poisoned himself with carbon-monoxide. In the end of his message, he wrote, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain…of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…” And then, “I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky.”

A photojournalist’s dilemma is one of the most complicated equations one could think of. It is hard to answer if they are wrong. People condemn them for chasing after the miserable, but on the other hand, other people feel curious of seeing the brutality as clearly as possible. One could not say that they earn their living from the tragedies of others, because they may pay more to complete a mission. The picture of the little Sudanese victim shocked the world; it could be even more frightening to the one who saw it graphically happening right in front of him, and further corroded his life thereafter.