The photograph above won a Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times. In the April 13, 1994 issue of the Times, there was a full page advertisement taken out by the Times’ owners in recognition of the three Pulitzer Prizes that it won that year. The Times described this award-winning picture in the following way: “To The New York Times, for Kevin Carter’s photograph of a vulture perching near a little girl in the Sudan who has collapsed from hunger, a picture that became an icon of starvation.”
When the photograph first appeared, it accompanied a story of the famine that has once again resulted from political violence and the chaos of civil war in the southern Sudan. The Times’ self-congratulatory account fails to adequately evoke the image’s shocking effect. The child is hardly larger than an infant; she is naked; she appears bowed over in weakness and sickness, incapable, it would seem, of moving; she is unprotected. No mother, no family, no one is present to prevent her from being attacked by the vulture, or succumbing to starvation and then being eaten. The image suggests that she has been abandoned. Why? The reader again is led to imagine various scenarios of suffering: she has been lost in the chaos of forced uprooting; her family has died; she has been deserted near death in order for her mother to hold on to more viable children. The image’s great success is that it causes the reader to want to know more. Why is this innocent victim of civil war and famine unprotected? The vulture embodies danger and evil, but the greater dangers and real forces of evil are not in the “natural world”; they are in the political world, including those nearby in army uniforms or in government offices in Khartoum. Famine has become a political strategy in the Sudan.
The photograph has been reprinted many times, and it has been duplicated in advertisements for a number of nongovernmental aid agencies that are raising funds to provide food to refugees. This is a classic instance of the use of moral sentiment to mobilize support for social action. One cannot look at this picture without wanting to do something to protect the child and drive the vulture away, or, as one aid agency puts it, to prevent other children from succumbing in the same heartlessly inhuman way by giving a donation.
The photograph calls for words to answer other questions. How did Carter allow the vulture to get so close without doing something to protect the child? What did he do after the picture was taken? Was it in some sense posed? Inasmuch as Kevin Carter chose to take the time, minutes that may have been critical at this point when she is near death, to compose an effective picture rather than to save the child, is he not also to blame for the child’s situation?
Those moral questions particular to Carter’s relationship (or nonrelationship to the dying child were only intensified when, on July 29, 1994, a few months after the Pulitzer Prize was given, The New York Times ran a death announcement for Kevin Carter, who had committed suicide at age thirty-three.
Watching and reading about suffering, especially suffering that exists somewhere else, has become a form of entertainment. Images of trauma are part of our political economy. Papers are sold, television programs gain audience share, careers are advanced, jobs are created, and prizes are awarded through the consumption and appropriation of images of suffering. Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize, but his victory, substantial as it was, was won because of the misery (and probably death of a nameless little girl. That less dubious side of the appropriation of human misery in the globalization of cultural processes is what must be addressed.
One message that comes across from viewing suffering from a distance is that for all the havoc and chaos in Western society, we are somehow better than this African society. We gain in moral status, and some of our organizations gain financially and politically, while those whom we represent, or appropriate, remain where they are, slowly dying, surrounded by vultures. This “consumption” of suffering in an era of so-called “disordered capitalism” is not so very different from the late nineteenth-century view that the savage barbarism in non-Christian lands justified the valuing of our own civilization at a higher level of development — a view that authorized colonial exploitation. Both are forms of cultural representation in which the moral, the commercial, and the political are deeply involved in each other. The point is that the image of the vulture and the child carries cultural entailments, including the brutal history of colonialism as well as the dubious cultural baggage of the more recent programs of “modernization” and globalization (of markets and financing, that have too often worsened human problems in sub-Saharan Africa.
Another effect of the world’s political and economic appropriation of images of such serious forms of suffering at a distance is that it has desensitized the viewer. Viewers are overwhelmed by the sheer number of brutal massacres. There is too much to see, and there appears to be too much to do anything about. Thus, our epoch’s dominating sense that complex problems can be neither understood nor fixed works with the massive globalization of images of suffering to produce moral fatigue, exhaustion of empathy, and political despair.
The photograph is a professional transformation of social life, a politically relevant rhetoric, a constructed form that ironically naturalizes experience. As Michael Shapiro puts it,… representation is the absence of presence, but because the real is never wholly present to us — how it is real for us is always mediated through some representational practice — we lose something when we think of representation as mimetic (or the exact copy of reality …
The cultural process of professional and political transformation is crucial to the way we come to appreciate human problems and to prepare policy responses. However, the process of appreciation and preparation adds to the problem itself.
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