Rest in Peace Kevin Carter

“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 […] the pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist." -Kevin Carter

All of the ostracism Carter received, combined with the difficulty of erasing all of the pain and human suffering he had experienced in his life, proved to be too much for the photographer. On July 27 1994, he parked a car next to a river in South Africa where he had spent much of his time as a child, and turned on the ignition after having taped one end of a hose to his exhaust pipe and the other end inside the passenger window. The cause of death is reported to be carbon monoxide poisoning. It seems possible that Carter’s unhappiness stemmed all the way back to his childhood, where he was exposed to apartheid and the unfair treatment of black people by white policemen. Add to this a history of witnessing and photographing the most brutal interactions between and among humans (even murder), a drug addiction problem, and a lifelong battle with depression, and it is understandable why Carter was so unhappy with his life.