Tragic story behind one of the world’s most iconic photos of vulture waiting for a starving child to die: How famed photographer killed himself after being tormented by guilt over shocking image

It remains one of the most memorable images ever captured.

A starving child collapsed to the ground. His arms and legs are reduced to the bone and he is too weak to move.

A vulture perches in the dusty bushes nearby, watching the extremely weak baby try to stand up again.

This shocking scene was captured by South African photographer Kevin Carter in famine-ravaged Sudan in 1993 in the photograph titled The Vulture and the Little Girl (although the child was later revealed to be a young boy).

The heartbreaking photo helped draw world attention to the country’s devastating humanitarian crisis, but it also triggered a furious backlash against Carter, who would continue to suffer the internal torment that culminated in tragedy.

Carter, who began documenting violence in Africa with a group of photographers known as the Bang Bang Club, arrived in 1993 to document the devastating civil war in Sudan.

After reaching the village of Ayod, Carter began photographing people suffering from famine near a feeding centre.

But as he moved away from the crowd and into the bush, Carter noticed an emaciated child, mistakenly believed to be a girl until 2011, trying to make her way towards the centre.

Malnourished and exhausted, the little boy (estimated to be around two years old) suddenly collapsed and lay motionless on the ground.

As Carter began taking photographs of the boy, a hooded vulture suddenly flew towards him and settled a few meters away, waiting for the young man to die.

Careful not to disturb the animal, Carter waited 20 minutes for the animal to get close enough to the child and positioned himself to take photographs. Only then did the photographer scare the garbage man away.

This foreboding shot of the child and the vulture was published in The New York Times on March 26, 1993, and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

But despite his professional success, Carter was unprepared for the barrage of criticism that would come his way.

After the image was published, hundreds of people wrote to The New York Times asking whether the child survived.

Despite his professional success, Kevin Carter (pictured) was unprepared for the barrage of criticism that came his way

Kevin Carter was a South African photojournalist and member of the so-called Bang-Bang Club. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his photograph depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan; died by suicide less than four months later at age 33

Kevin Carter’s photograph titled ‘The Vulture and the Little Girl’ was published in the New York Times on March 26, 1993.

As a result the newspaper published a special editor’s note the next day: ‘The photographer reports that the vulture has recovered sufficiently after its expulsion to continue its journey. It is not known whether it has been reached or not [feeding] central’.

Others bombarded Carter with questions about why he did not help the starving child, and he was subjected to angry criticism.

Florida’s The St. ‘The man who adjusts his lens to capture the correct frame of the woman’s suffering may be just another predator, another vulture, on the stage,’ wrote the St. Petersburg Times.

The public was horrified not only that Carter did not immediately chase the vulture away, but also that the photographer did not help the weakened child afterwards.

Carter often expressed regret for not helping the boy, but The photojournalist was told not to approach famine victims for fear of spreading the disease.

Thanks to this photograph, Carter made his mark as a lauded photojournalist and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

But he was struggling privately, personally, and Carter died by suicide at the age of 33, just four months after receiving this honor.

‘I am truly sorry,’ he wrote in a note. ‘The pain of life suppresses joy to the point where joy ceases to exist.

‘I am haunted by vivid memories of murders, corpses, anger and pain… children starving or injured, trigger-happy madmen, often the police, murderous executioners…’

Fellow Bang Bang Club member Joao Silva told Time magazine after Carter’s suicide that he had become ‘depressed’ after his duty in Sudan.

Meanwhile, her friend Judith Matliff told how Carter was ‘tormented’ by people who told her she should help the boy.

He became addicted to drugs and was arrested after crashing his car into a house, resulting in his partner leaving him.

“People were calling him on assignments, and he couldn’t get out of bed,” Matliff said in a documentary about Carter’s life.

According to his colleagues, he continued to skate even when he was able to work.

Carter visited Mozambique on business, but upon returning home he realized he had left the raw film on the plane.

After the mistake, he told his friend Reedwan Vally, “That’s it, I can’t live, I can’t do it anymore.”

In a letter published in Time magazine after Carter’s death, his sister Patricia Gird Randburg wrote: ‘The pain of his mission to open the world’s eyes to the many problems and injustices that were tearing apart his own soul eventually took its toll on him.’

Referring to his brother’s Pulitzer prize, he said: ‘It was evidence that his work was valuable.’

The photographer’s tragic story would go on to inspire Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers, who wrote a song called ‘Kevin Carter’.

The lyrics were written by the band’s troubled guitarist, Richey Edwards, before his disappearance in 1995. They explore Carter’s mental anguish and the complex moral questions his photographs raise.

‘“Hello, Time magazine, hello, Pulitzer Prize/ Tribal scars in the Technicolor Bang-bang club, AK-47 watch/ Kevin Carter Hello, Time magazine, hello, Pulitzer Prize/ The vulture forever trailed the lie with the white pipe/ You wasted your life in black and white,” Edwards wrote.

Since the haunting photo was first published in the New York Times, questions about the fate of the child in the photo have continued to mount, even years after Carter’s death.

In 2011, a journalist finally found the answer the public was hoping for: He made it to the child feeding center and survived.

After tracking down the child’s father in Sudan, it turned out that the child was actually a boy and not a girl, as previously suggested in the title of the image.

His name was Kong Nyong, and although he survived the famine, he died of fever in 2007.