The Atrocity Exhibition: A War Fuelled by

Charles Paul Freund

In 1993, a photographer named Kevin Carter went to Sudan to capture images of that nation’s dismal and unending civil war.  One of the pictures he took was of a starving little girl: she had collapsed in the bush, and a vulture nearby seemed to be waiting for her to die.  The photo was reproduced all over the world, touching many thousands of people, becoming an icon of African misery, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and, a year later, apparently contributing to Carter’s own suicide.

Carter, a white South African, spent only a couple of days in Sudan.  According to Susan D Moeller, who tells Carter’s story in Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, he had gone into the bush seeking relief from the terrible starvation and suffering he was documenting, when he encountered the emaciated girl.  When he saw the vulture land, Carter waited quietly, hoping the bird would spread its wings and give him an even more dramatic image.  It didn’t, and he eventually chased the bird away.  The girl gathered her strength and resumed her journey toward a feeding centre.  Afterward, writes Moeller, Carter “sat by a tree, talked to God, cried, and thought about his own daughter, Megan.”

When the image of the prostrate girl and the patient vulture appeared, many people demanded to know what had happened to her.  The New York Times explained in an editors’ note that while she resumed her trek, the photographer didn’t know if she had survived.  Carter stood accused; callers in the middle of the night denounced him.  The girl began to haunt the photographer.  In June 1994, Carter, beset by difficulties, killed himself.  His suicide note speaks of the ghosts he could not escape, the “vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain,” and the “starving and wounded children” ever before his eyes.

This death of a messenger is a cautionary tale for an age of atrocity imagery.  Terrible pictures of agony and murder have come to America from Lebanon, from Somalia, from Haiti, from Rwanda, and now from Kosovo, and they have unleashed the most powerful of emotions.  Yet these emotions emerge from pictures that tell inevitably distorted versions of their awful realities.  Their concrete representations suggest a moral imperative to act, to intervene with force against evil.  Yet the resulting interventions have, one after the other, revealed the illusions of mercy: there is no such thing as military humanitarianism.  Such action, despite its moral incentive, is always political, and always results in political consequences and responsibilities.  When these assert themselves, the atrocity imagery changes: it often features Americans.

In Carter’s case, Western newspaper readers saw a little girl.  Carter, in the Sudanese village where he landed, was watching 20 people starve to death each hour.  Perhaps he might have laid aside his camera to give the victims what succor he could (and thus never have encountered the girl in the bush); perhaps his photographs could have led to greater help than he could personally give.  Should he have carried one girl to safety?  Carter was surrounded by hundreds of starving children.  When he sat by the tree and wept, it was beneath a burden of futility.  But his was not a photo of futility, nor of mass starvation, nor of religious factionalism, nor of civil war.  Readers saw a little girl.  In part, at least, Carter died for that.

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