Posts tagged pictures
Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sets himself ablaze in protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government.
Year: 1963
Photographer: Malcolm W. Browne
Country: Saigon, Vietnam
Priest Luis Padillo offers last rites to a loyalist soldier who is mortally wounded by a sniper during military rebellion against President Bétancourt at Puerto Cabello naval base.
Year: 1962
Photographer: Héctor Rondón Lovera
Country: Puerto Cabello, Venezuela
A parachutist lands on top of another, both jumpers made it to the ground safely.
Year: 1962
Photographer: Dozier Mobley
A right-wing student assassinates Inejiro Asanuma, Socialist Party Chairman, during his speech at the Hibiya Hall.
Year: 1960
Photographer: Yasushi Nagao
Country: Tokyo, Japan
Dorothy Counts, one of the first black students to enter the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School is mocked by whites on her first day of school. People threw rocks and screamed at her “Go back where you came from”. Walking beside her is Dr. Edwin Tompkins, a friend of the family and a professor at the black college Johnson C. Smith University. After a string of abuses, Dorothy’s family withdrew her from the school after only four days. Across the United States this week children had been enrolling for the new school year. In the south tension was particularly high for districts trying to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling that states should integrate their schools “with deliberate speed”.
Year: 1957
Photographer: Douglas Martin
Country: Charlotte, North Carolina, US
A German World War II prisoner, released by the Soviet Union, is reunited with his daughter. The child had not seen her father since she was one-year-old.
Year: 1956
Photographer: Helmuth Pirath
Country: West Germany
A competitor tumbles off his motorcycle during the Motorcross World Championship at the Volk Mølle race course.
Year: 1955
Photographer: Mogens von Haven
Country: Denmark
I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … 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…I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky.
Kevin Carter
“He ventured into the dark alleys of life capturing images which no one ever had seen before. Or who would have wanted to face those sickening truths which were least appealing to human eyes? His pictures pierced our heart, splitting it wide open letting out our anguish, pain, disgust or whatever emotions that you’ve never known before. Emotions that were not familiar to the comfort zone where you, I and millions of others have been lingering for long.”
As you look at the picture, what comes to your mind? Shock, disbelief, pain, anguish…and eventually you will be left behind with a disturbed mind stifled by numerous thoughts. Some of us will be left with a disdain for the man who captured this image on frame.
The vulture & child photograph first appeared in NY Times in 1993. Carter was in Sudan to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan.
While taking the shots of famine victims, he saw this little girl crawling all the way to the feeding centre. As he adjusted the frame for her, a vulture approached. Carter himself later said that he waited for the vulture to spread its wings, but it didn’t happen, and so he chased the vulture away after taking the shot. Funds came pouring in to Sudan and people from all over the world wanted to know what eventually happened to the little girl, something Carter did not have any answer for.
Though the photograph earned Carter a Pulitzer Prize, he came under severe criticism for abandoning the child. A Florida-based news paper described him as: “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.”
On 27 July 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfontein Spruit river, near the Field and Study Centre, an area where he used to play as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning, aged 33. Portions of Carter’s suicide note read the quote I mentioned above.
You might also want to check The Bang Bang Club (wiki - movie) and watch a documentary entitled The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club
