In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions
of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and
witnessing the horror of the famine, Carter began to take
photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched
whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young
emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while
struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed
vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes,
hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter
snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away.
However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing
and not helping the girl:
"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her
suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the
scene."
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for
the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of
people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had
survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note
saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture,
but that her ultimate fate was unknown. On April 2, 1994 Nancy
Buirski, a foreign New York Times picture editor, phoned Carter to
inform him he had won the most coveted prize for photography.
Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on
May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.
He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and
helped the child. Journalists at the time were supposedly warned
never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism
and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was
accidentally shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while
covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic
suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit
river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at
as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to
his pickup trucks exhaust pipe and running the other end to the
passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the
age of 33.
