The Breakthrough Shot.
In search of everything the war left behind, they found sticks of dusty bones and cups of skulls choking each step they took. For every step, there was a corpse swamped by maggots and many other insects. The shrunk corpses repeatedly kept the war in their faces. Silva and Carter had travelled all the way from South Africa to capture the daily realities of survivors. The country had been at war with itself and the more she won, the more her citizens fed on burnt farm produces and the hope that someday this too will be over. One could easily lay hand on abject poverty in Ayod and many other neighbouring villages.
Back home, Carter’s girlfriend continued to pray that everything should fall in place for him in Ayod. Her boyfriend has always been a devoted photographer working tooth and nail to still memories.
It was Silva Joao who got the photojournalist job with the UN’s Operation Lifeline Sudan team but he called on his friend to join him. In Sudan, rebel lords were violent against the press and never tolerated anything that had to do with the press. Many of the stories sold out to the international space were stolen from spies and repentant Sudanese rebels. Nothing made the news in Sudan except war and continuous violence.
This situation pressed hard on the United Nations. They made plans to reach these communities with food and other essentials. The UN officials also persuaded the rebel lords to allow them to bring food for the people as well as flag off their campaign against hunger in Sudan. This exactly was what brought Silva and Carter to work with the UN as official photographers. Despite his many struggles and having to borrow his way through from friends and family, Carter became the photographer whose life spoke in volumes of pains and biting sympathies.
The rebel lords had only agreed to a 24 hours tour around the wrecked villages and this was more than enough for the two friends who took to capturing different locations and stories at the same time. While Silva was fascinated by war events, Carter devoted his lens to the adult and children who survived the wars. The UN’s research team recorded that the daily deaths of malnourished adults and children surpassed one another on a daily basis. Carter, for the first few hours, captured breastfeeding mothers whose breasts were flat and had no milk in them due to hunger. These mothers in trying to help their babies fed them with dry sand and whatever they felt could be taken as a liquid. He also snapped a staggering teenager who in trying to carry his two siblings fell off a number of times until he could no longer walk and started chest crawling towards the UN’s camp which was some miles away.
Silva, on the other side, was busy capturing the trucks and many littered bullets on the streets. It was practically a village of ruins and each junction had loads of dead militants pecked into by carnivorous birds of every kind. Silva’s lens also captured some militias running towards nearly dilapidated bungalows where he guessed was one of the headquarters of the rebel squad.
When Carter finally caught up with Silva, he couldn’t keep his experiences to himself. The mental deposits were more than his mind could keep. He had to let them out so he could maintain his sanity.
“Hey, Sil. I recently took a shot I will never forget.”
“Can I see?” Silva asked with a lot of curiosity in his voice.
“Why not. I had taken this picture in Ayod. The little child with a visible frame of bones and a leaf of flesh covering his malnourished look was on his way to the UN’s camp for food. I guess he had seen others run towards that direction too. But as he ran, his strength began to leave him. He fell of countlessly but he never stopped moving. He tried taking some rest along the carpeted bullet road and continued his crippling movement. I never let my lens miss a second of his struggle because this was typical of what every child went through in Sudan during the war. The little child after some time could not run or even crawl. Her breath was an exhale nearer death. Then, I felt a fly perch on my forehead. In wiping it off, my lens tilted a bit beside the almost lifeless child and there was a vulture eyeing the child from a distance. I flashed my light for a couple of shots afterwards.”
“Wow, this must be a perfect story for the UN awareness campaign”. Silva commented as they both continued to take other shots till they left Sudan.
Life afterwards wasn’t the same for Carter whose shot of the dying girl went viral and debut in the New York Times in 1993 with the title “The Struggling Girl”. A year later, Carter was nominated for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography 1994 and he won. His fame ushered the people of Ayod into a level of attention as the world became aware of them and their needs. Silva too went on to become celebrated. Four months in the public glare was all Carter could grapple with before finally committing suicide.
One of the investigative journalists who dug up rare facts about Carter stated that he probably died of comparing the dying child he captured with his own daughter and this made him miserable. He must have considered it a ridiculous thing to watch the child die without even trying to help, all in the name of capturing real moments of those who survived the war. The people of Ayod and her neighbouring villages might have survived the war but Kelvin Carter never did. He died a broken hero.
