2026 note · Photography
The photo you can't retake
The blog's most-linked post retold the story of Kevin Carter's Pulitzer photograph from Sudan.
In April 2007, between a fractal render and a Linux tutorial, this blog retold the story of a photographer who is said to have hated his most important picture. It is still the most-linked post on the site after the home page.
The story
Kevin Carter was a South African photojournalist. In March 1993, in southern Sudan, he photographed a starving child slumped on the ground with a vulture waiting behind. The New York Times published the picture that month, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1994, and Carter took his own life that July, aged 33. The quotation in the 2007 post, in which he says he hates the photograph, circulated widely online and is hard to trace to a source. What is well documented is that readers wanted to know what had happened to the child, and that the image followed him.
Carter's case is still taught as a question about what a photographer owes the people in front of the lens. The 2007 post doesn't try to answer it, and neither does this note.
Back to 2007
The original post ends with Carter's death and draws no lesson from it. It remains at its address, in Spanish: "La historia de un fotógrafo que odió su foto más importante".