The Journalist and the Vulture

On 28 May, during a Supreme Court hearing on the migrant crisis caused by the nationwide lockdown, Tushar Mehta, the solicitor general of India, narrated a story to the bench. It was about a photojournalist called Kevin Carter, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a photograph called “The Vulture and The Little Girl.” A few months after winning the Pulitzer, Carter, troubled by all that he had witnessed, took his own life. Mehta pulled the story out of the archives to blame the media for keeping the mounting death toll of migrant workers, and the tragic visuals emerging of their struggles, on the front pages of newspapers or in public consciousness. He implied that those documenting the crisis were akin to vultures, citing Carter’s storied image completely outside its context, and with gross factual inaccuracies. 

Last week, like the weeks before it, Indians woke up to jolting images of the humanitarian crisis—one of a starved migrant worker eating a dog carcass, and another of baby tugging at a cloth covering her dead mother. The 23-year-old woman had collapsed at the Muzaffarpur railway station, due to a combination of factors including heat, hunger, and dehydration. The tragic visuals made it increasingly difficult for the Supreme Court to turn a blind eye to the migrant-worker crisis. On 26 May, the court took suo moto cognisance of the crisis and issued notice to all governments, ordering the centre and the states to immediately provide free-of-cost transport, food and shelter to migrant workers. But for Mehta, the growing coverage of the migrant-worker crisis seemed to have raised another question: what were the journalists who were documenting the crisis doing to help?

Before I dive into Carter’s story, I would like to state that most of my colleagues have been donating to relief efforts for migrants, or aiding in the small ways they can—without writing stories about their acts of charity. It is a personal choice, but not a journalistic one. Within journalism, which like every other profession has its own rules, ethics, code of conduct, such interventions are frowned upon.

Carter is the poster boy for this ethical dilemma in journalism. His work is taught in journalism schools, and the Pulitzer-winning image in particular—debatably among the most controversial photographs in the history of photojournalism—has come to define the ethical grey zone the media works in.

The story of the photograph, warts and all, goes like this: Carter was South African, born in 1960. He grew up amid the horror of the apartheid years, and came to photo journalism in a roundabout way. He initially joined the army—military conscription was compulsory in South Africa during the apartheid years. An obituary in Time magazine said that Carter found upholding the apartheid regime—institutionalised in the South African Defense Force—to be loathsome. While specific details of this incident are not known, the piece said that while he was in the army, Carter was beaten up by Afrikaans-speaking soldiers after he defended a black mess-hall waiter. He finished serving in the army around 1983, and drifted into journalism, working initially as a sports photographer for the Johannesburg Sunday Express, and then as a conflict reporter, covering the increasing violence in the black townships of South Africa. 

When riots broke out, Carter used his camera to expose the brutality of the apartheid regime. He soon became part of a coterie of courageous photographers that a local paper christened the “Bang-Bang Club.” Aside from Carter, the group included Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, and João Silva, all active within the townships of South Africa between 1990 and 1994, during the transition from the apartheid to democracy. “Bang-Bang” referred to the sound of gunfire, a consistent backdrop to their work.

In March 1993, Carter, taking a break from documenting the heartbreak unfolding in apartheid South Africa, went on assignment to famine-stricken Sudan. To this day, the famine, which  resulted from a combination of civil war, disease, homelessness, and hunger, is considered one of the world’s darkest humanitarian crises. An LA Times report from the time noted that, according to international agencies, about 1.7 million Sudanese had been displaced after nine years of civil war, and close to eight hundred thousand people were at risk of starvation. US officials came to refer to it as a “silent famine”—thousands upon thousands had died, but no one seemed to be talking about it, because few international reporters or agencies had access to the region.         

Working near the village of Ayod, Carter stumbled across a small girl, who was resting amid a crawl to a United Nations food centre. A vulture watched the girl. Carter later said he waited nearly twenty minutes for the bird to open its large wings—the money shot. When it became apparent the bird would not comply, Carter took the image, shooed the bird away, and left. The photograph was bought by the New York Times, where it appeared for the first time, on 26 March 1993.

Overnight, the photo became iconic and was reproduced widely. The Times received hundreds of calls, criticising the photographer and expressing concern for the girl. Instead of acting on the  empathy the image evoked, readers—in their discomfort with the tragic image—blamed Carter. They were outraged that the photographer waited so long for his shot and did not shoo the vulture away sooner. They were appalled that the girl did not receive his help, that he had seemingly walked away instead of helping her to the food centre.

A week later, the paper clarified that it believed the child had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, though it could not confirm whether she reached the feeding centre. Public opinion was set: some critics began referring to Carter as the scavenger, with one calling him “another vulture on the scene” Most people believed, and said, that Carter should not only have taken the picture, but should have chased the vulture away, and assisted the child afterwards.

For the record, Carter did shoo away the vulture. The part that comes next—assisting the child—is what needs to be discussed with more nuance. In my speaking engagements, I have regularly reasoned with public-health professionals, academicians, and activists that it is not a journalist’s job to intervene.

Most journalists are torn between their moral obligation to help, and their professional obligation to bear witness. Carter was painfully aware of it too. Time quoted him having said, of a shoot-out: “I had to think visually … I am zooming in on a tight shot of the dead guy and a splash of red. Going into his khaki uniform in a pool of blood in the sand. The dead man’s face is slightly gray. You are making a visual here. But inside something is screaming, ‘My God.’ But it is time to work. Deal with the rest later. If you can’t do it, get out of the game.”

Every journalist who has been reporting on the pandemic has been traumatised by what they saw or reported. No one has done it for a moral license to feel better about themselves—this work, in fact, has the opposite effect on journalists. Over time, it changes you forever. The activist, filmmaker and writer Susan Sontag summed up this journalistic dilemma best: “The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.”

Besides, there are other factors to consider. When I visit Bangladesh to cover the Rohingya crisis, one of my most important interviews takes place before heading into the refugee camps, with the Bangladeshi official who lays out the do’s and dont’s. If one fails to follow these, the J-visa, or journalist visa, can be cancelled. I have written about the process in depth in a media story that explains how complicated reporting on a humanitarian crisis can be. The stipulations put forward by the host government include safety concerns, as well as complex and controversial questions of race, class, and power. Journalists are given instructions to not meddle with domestic affairs, especially in war-torn nations, which Sudan was in 1993, when Carter visited. He had also been advised not to touch anyone, as there was a threat of infectious diseases.

Besides, Carter, a battle-hard reporter, understood well that he was not there to help the people—that was the United Nations’ job. He was there to capture the famine, and to startle the international community into action. It is worth noting that he captured an image that did so, without manipulating or staging it.

When the solicitor general Mehta brought it up before the Supreme Court, Carter’s work fell short of his standards, which benefit from hindsight and the inability of a dead man to defend himself. He told the apex court that Carter’s work spelled “doom”—he categorised those producing similar images as “prophets” of this doom. Yet, by every journalistic standard on the planet, including the Pulitzer Committee’s, Carter had captured an image that left an indelible memory of the Sudanese famine. The image continues to be counted among Time’s 100 most influential images of all time. It made the ‘silent famine’ an international headline, and brought much needed aid and attention to it. The supposed lack of compassion that Mehta derided was precisely the strength of the image—it was just the cold, hard truth.

Close to twenty-six years after Carter’s death, no one familiar with his work has any doubt that he was traumatised by what he saw. He struggled with substance abuse, depression, suicidal ideation, and in the final months before his death, financial insecurity. Six days after he won the Pulitzer Prize, on 18 April, he learned that his fellow journalist, Oosterbroek, also of the Bang-Bang Club, had been killed while on assignment. Marinovich, another member, had been gravely wounded.

The suicide note Carter left behind give a glimpse of the burden he carried. He wrote that he was depressed and without money to pay off his debts, or pay child support. “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain,” he wrote, “of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.”

The anguish that Carter carried within him was the price he paid for belonging to a profession that requires you to maintain dispassionate composure in the face of suffering. It is the anguish Indian journalists are carrying as they cover the coronavirus pandemic and the migrant crisis unfolding in front of our eyes, that the Narendra Modi administration has been blind to. These journalists saw what Mehta refused to, when he informed the apex court on 31 March that “there is no person walking on the roads” out of desperation to reach home.

Mehta’s argument—that journalists can do more than documenting the crisis—is a misdirection. It is keeping people from asking the fundamental questions revealed by our work: why has the government failed to do its job? Why are so many migrant families forced to be at the mercy of strangers? Much like Carter, my colleagues are asking this question through their work, risking their lives to bring images to the public. They are bearing witness to seismic events because that is our job, and the world is better for it.