When a picture speaks

"The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions."

-Andre Gide-

As I Googled 'amazing photos' (Just for the fun of it) I came across this one particular picture. You have no idea how much it broke my heart. I practically gasped and my tears couldn't hold heavy drops ='( The picture was taken by an Award-winning South African Photojournalist, Kevin Carter.
Here's what I'm talking about:

Source: Wikipedia

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to Southern Sudan. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein 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.

No, Carter didn't help the little girl because he left as soon as he took the photo. No one knows the fate of the girl. Carter then committed suicide months after the trip to Sudan by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33.
Portions of Carter's suicide note read:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... 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 gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."

This is a poem in response to the news of Kevin Carter's suicide:

"My dear
Unsuspecting,
This I need to say,
That fear,
Stultifying
Terror kept at bay
By sheer
Crass chattering,
Noise, cant, making hay,
Sincere
theorizing,
By could, and might, and may –
Is here,
Close by, lurking,
Clawing me away.
I veer,
Stumbling, lurching,
Blind, I cannot stay."
-Lesley Watson Cushman-


Kevin Carter
(September 13, 1960 – July 27, 1994)

"How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."
-Barry Lopez-


"We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events."
-Gerda Lerner-


"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
-Martin Luther King, Jr-

Love,
K11