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A friend sent me this article on Pulitzer Prize winning PJ Kevin Carter.



excerpt from a letter he left behind:

Dear God,

I promise I will never waste my food no matter how bad it can taste and how full I may be. I pray that He will protect this little boy, guide and deliver him away from his misery. I pray that we will be more sensitive towards the world around us and not be blinded by our own selfish nature and interests.

I hope this picture will always serve as a reminder to us that how fortunate we are and that we must never ever take things for granted.

On this good day. Let's make a prayer for the suffering in anywhere anyplace around the globe and send this friendly reminder to others "Think & look at this... when you complain about your food and the food we wasted daily.......

genji,
Good find! and excellent pictures, I always tell my children about the waste of foods and the fortunes which they have here.

I don't know, but had you ever lived in VN after the war ended in 75?

I had more worst pictures than this one in my brains and I now alway woke up with a bad dreams in which I'm struggling with the lack of nutrition and poor of hygiene in those concentration and labour camps + the tortured in both spirit + body from the liberation of the Communist.

birddog,

no i dont remember much from when i was in Vn, i was 6 when i left.
But recently i did see a doco on the affects of agent orange on childern to this day, it was gut wrenching stuff!!

That is a frighteningly telling image, and an excellent example of PJ.

Thanx for bringing this to our attention.

Hey genji I think there are better versions of the photo floating around the net....I think I got it in my HDD at home...I'll check

http://www.thisisyesterday.com/ints/KCarter.html

"The image 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 - and hopes for anchoring a career spent hounding the news, free-lancing in war zones, waiting anxiously for assignments amid dire finances, staying in the line of fire for that one great picture. 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. The South African soaked up the attention. "I swear I got the most applause of anybody," Carter wrote back to his parents in Johannesburg. "I can't wait to show you the trophy. It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgment of my work I could receive."

Carter was feted at some of the most fashionable spots in New York City. Restaurant patrons, overhearing his claim to fame, would come up and ask for his autograph. Photo editors at the major magazines wanted to meet the new hotshot, dressed in his black jeans and T shirts, with the tribal bracelets and diamond-stud earring, with the war-weary eyes and tales from the front lines of Nelson Mandela's new South Africa. Carter signed with Sygma, a prestigious picture agency representing 200 of the world's best photojournalists. "It can be a very glamorous business," says Sygma's U.S. director, Eliane Laffont. "It's very hard to make it, but Kevin is one of the few who really broke through. The pretty girls were falling for him, and everybody wanted to hear what he had to say."

There would be little time for that. 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.""

Thanks genji,

It's Powerfull images like this that makes you think how lucky we are living here,but also how POOR we are as a human race.
We Need people like Kevin Carter , to remind us all we have a moral obligation to our fellow humans.

NeoN