In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Alma claims, “All things denote there is a God.”
All things?
This photograph was taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter who covered apartheid and humanitarian crises. It depicts an emaciated Sudanese girl crawling toward a UN refugee camp while a vulture looks on, hoping for an easy meal. In 1993, it was published in the New York Times and, the following year, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Some were highly critical of the photograph—or rather, the photographer. Florida’s St. Petersburg Times wrote that Carter “might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”
Carter came to regret his having been behind the camera that day. And just months later, he committed suicide. He taped one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and ran the other end to the passenger-side window. Carter then started the truck, rolled up the windows, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He was 33.
His suicide note read: “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 read about this problem of exploiting the world for one’s own gain in various forms in the photography sense. Most recently was when the New York Times Lens blog covered the huge influx of amateur and regular photojournalists coming to earthquake struck Haiti. Due to the proximity it was possible for aspiring photographers and tightly budgeted regional newspapers to get a cheap plane ticket over (versus the floods in Pakistan across the world).
The discussion centered around the leeching effect of those photographers basically making a buck or reputation off the unfortunate events of the earthquake. Their basic conclusion (or at least the guy running the NYT Lens blog) was that a certain amount of photographers at a disaster was appropriate to bring attention to the situation but in the case of Haiti the number was grossly obese.
Back to the moral dilemma itself is the balance between exploiting others in their unfortune. Perhaps the most experienced person in this matter is James Nachtwey and I highly recommend watching the documentary about the later part of his career (War Photographer (2001)). After seeing all the stuff he has undoubtedly seen he keeps doing his job because he believes that without him there to document what was happening it will continue to happen and be repeated later on in history. That may or may not be true but if that is your genuine motivation while making such pictures I would certainly appreciate your contributions to society rather than a leeching prick.
I guess it depends on your personal beliefs about the notion of “evil”. All people basically cater to their highest value at any given time, regardless of their stated motivations. For this reason, behavior can only be classified as evil in a subjective sense, which is more or less arbitrary.
The same can be said about suffering and, in fact, it can also be said that a lifetime of pain and torment is preferable to nothing at all. In most Christian-type belief systems, life is eternal, which would make any suffering during one’s lifetime on Earth a mere hiccup in an infinite timeline. It could easily be argued that the experience of great torment and suffering is a gift from God that, when viewed as a part of that infinite timeline, amounts to no significant negative impact on a person and should therefore be appreciated as much as any joyous or beautiful thing in life.
@Michael_R
Then why do people look forward to eternal bliss? Won’t eternal bliss be completely devoid of beauty, joy, empathy if there is nothing that is ugly, saddening or painful?
That’s horrifying. I don’t know that he’s necessarily guilty, but I don’t think it’s helping either. People can justify what they’re doing by saying that they’re shedding light on these horrors and tragedies, but people have been filming war and violence for the better part of a century, and wars and violence are still happening. Maybe put the camera down and actually do something about it.
it’s worth mentioning that his taking this photograph likely led to more publicity and actual human benefit than his simply helping the child would have. though, obviously, why not just take the picture AND help the kid? and 20 minutes waiting for the vulture to spread its wings? and then he chased it off? why not toss a rock, snap the picture, and help the kid? good deed done, picture taken, 19 minutes saved.
“In March 1993 [Kevin] Carter made a trip to Sudan. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to an emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away.[5] However, he came under criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the little girl:
The St. Petersburg Times in Florida said this of Carter: “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.”[6]
The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor’s note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown.”