Reply #224: If you think pics of "perrito" aren't art, is this pic art? ------>

[HamdenRice]

It seems that the majority of people responding to this thread don't think that this picture is art:



If not, do you think that the picture below is art? It was taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter. Carter was a member of an informal group of recklessly brave photojournalists known as the "bang bang club" for their willingness to get to the front lines of political violence to take pictures. (I had a friend who was not a member of the club, but in the same business around the same time, and after spending a few days with him, I understand why they had a reputation for being insane.)

Carter focused on political violence in South Africa, where he is said to be the first photographer to photograph a "necklacing" -- the execution by radicals of a "collaborator" by burning with tires and gasoline.

Exhausted and depressed by South Africa, Carter took a trip to the Sudan to photograph a famine, where he made his most famous photograph -- a picture of a little girl, overcome with hunger on the way to a feeding station, being stalked by a vulture:



After taking the picture, Carter sat under a tree chain smoking cigarettes and crying.

The picture became a world wide sensation after it was published in the U.S., but Cater was also criticized for not saving the girl. (It is said she did revive enough to get to the feeding station.)

Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in May 1994 for this picture.

By July 1994, Carter was dead, at age 33. He committed suicide blaming money problems, the images he could not get out of his head, and sadness over the death of a friend and fellow photographer, Ken Oosterbroek, who was shot to death in Tokoza Township, while standing just a few feet from Carter:

"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 & corpses & anger & 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."

So is it art?