Tribute: RIP Ken Oosterbroek and Kevin Carter. By Janet Carr

Firstly Ken Oosterbroek who was shot and killed by police on 18th April 1994 in Thokoza township while photographing a riot.
 

                                                 RIP Ken

 Second is Kevin Carter, also in The Bang Bang Club. He committed suicide three months after Ken died, shortly after winning the 1994 Pulitzer prize for the photograph of the starving child and vulture (below). Ken Oosterbroek was his best friend and Kevin always felt that it should have been him who died that day. Early on Monday, April 18, the Bang-Bang Club headed out to Thokoza township, 10 miles from downtown Johannesburg, to cover an outbreak of violence. Shortly before noon, with the sun too bright for taking good pictures, Carter returned to the city. Then on the radio he heard that his best friend, Oosterbroek, had been killed in Thokoza. Marinovich had been gravely wounded. Oosterbroek’s death devastated Carter, and he returned to work in Thokoza the next day, even though the violence had escalated. 

 He later told friends that he and not Ken “should have taken the bullet.”

Photo by Kevin Carter

The image above presaged no celebration: a child barely alive, a vulture so eager for carrion. Yet the photograph that epitomized Sudan’s famine would win Kevin Carter fame. On May 23, 14 months after capturing that memorable scene, Carter walked up to the dais in the classical rotunda of Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library and received the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.

Two months after receiving his Pulitzer, Carter would be dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in Johannesburg, a suicide at 33. His red pickup truck was parked near a small river where he used to play as a child; a green garden hose attached to the vehicle’s exhaust funneled the fumes inside. “I’m really, really sorry,” he explained in a note left on the passenger seat beneath a knapsack. “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.” The suicide note he left behind is a litany of nightmares and dark visions, a clutching attempt at autobiography, self-analysis, explanation, excuse. After coming home from New York, he wrote, he was “depressed . . . without phone . . . money for rent . . . money for child support . . . money for debts . . . money!!! . . . I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners . . . ” And then this: “I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky.”

Kevin told the story of the photograph thus…Immediately after the plane touched down in the village of Ayod in the Sudan, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried.

With the Pulitzer, however, he had to deal not only with acclaim but also with the critical focus that comes with fame. Some journalists in South Africa called his prize a “fluke,” alleging that he had somehow set up the tableau. Others questioned his ethics. “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering,” said the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, “might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.” Even some of Carter’s friends wondered aloud why he had not helped the girl.

The Braamfonteinspruit is a small river that cuts southward through Johannesburg’s northern suburbs – and through Parkmore, where the Carters once lived. At around 9 p.m., Kevin Carter backed his red Nissan pickup truck against a blue gum tree at the Field and Study Center. He had played there often as a little boy. The Sandton Bird Club was having its monthly meeting there, but nobody saw Carter as he used silver gaffer tape to attach a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and run it to the passenger-side window. Wearing unwashed Lee jeans and an Esquire T shirt, he got in and switched on the engine. Then he put music on his Walkman and lay over on his side, using the knapsack as a pillow.
 

RIP Ken, Kevin