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If a hundred of the most talented members of the advertising industry were tasked with creating an image to illustrate the concepts of poverty and famine, quite possibly none of them would come up with anything nearly as grippingly and devastatingly effective as a 1993 picture snapped by South African freelance photographer Kevin Carter: His poignant photograph of an emaciated toddler who collapsed from hunger on her way to a feeding center in famine-ravaged Sudan while a vulture ominously loomed in the background was originally published in the New York Times (which later described it as a metaphor for Africa's despair) and earned Carter the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in the Feature Photography category, and the image has since become widely known as a metaphor for Africa's despair. As described in Time magazine, the scene Carter captured in his now-famous photograph was one he stumbled across during a trip he made on his own in order to cover the civil strife in war-torn Sudan: But Kevin Carter was also a troubled soul, struggling with issues such as financial insecurity, drug problems, failed relationships, and the horrors of having witnessed multiple scenes of death — enough of a burden for anyone to struggle with, but in Carter's case a burden made extra-heavy by the critical condemnation heaped upon him for taking the photograph that had made him world-famous: On 27 July 1994, barely two months after having received his Pulitzer Prize, 33-year-old Kevin Carter could shoulder that burden no more and took his own life: Although the purported diary entry (beginning Dear God, I promise I will never waste my food) that has been tacked onto this photograph may sound like something Kevin Carter might have written, those words were not recorded in his diary, nor are they known to have been written or spoken by him. They were added to the photograph by an unknown hand after the picture had been circulating on the Internet for several years. Kevin Carter's life (and death) was the subject of the 2004 documentary, The Life of Kevin Carter.
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