Kevin Carter, Photojournalist.

Kevin Carter. Source: www.roads.co

Is it normal if I say that it is common for me to hear people killing themselves because they are depressed? Or simply put, people who are not satisfied with their life, someone who is not religious. Kevin Carter, on the other hand, killed himself because he was depressed from what he had experienced as a Photojournalist. He witnessed, like many other Photojournalist would, a barbaric action of killing people and he could not do anything to help. Little did he know that the photographs he took actually help spread the awareness of what happen on the other side of the world.

Kevin Carter, was born and raised in South Africa. Both of his parents were supporters of apartheid, which, contrary to his belief making them ended up in arguments because of their different perspective. Carter himself wanted to expose the cruelty of apartheid by giving an insight of what the world can change. The death of Kevin Carter was made into a documentary by Dan Krauss and from that on, many people start to realise of what he wanted to show, as he stated in his suicide note that, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain...of starving and wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners".

A Sudanese girl during the famine in Sudan, was being watched by a vulture. This photograph won Carter the Pulitzer Prize and he received massive criticism for not helping the little girl. Source: www.theguardian.com

It is sad for someone to kill themselves over depression, we as a society should not criticised, in this context, the Photojournalist based on the pictures they took. They may earn a lot of money from taking photos, but behind what actually happen at the scenes, remain unknown. It was believed that it took Carter 20 minutes to take the above shot and the status of the girl whether she managed to get to the food centre or not was not known. It is such a lose that, we lose a soul that can reveal of what happen in other countries, as they tried their best to show the world the "originality", as in to make people feel what they feel through the photos they took, over a depression.