At The New York Times, the picture editors were pondering over whether to submit Kevin’s vulture picture for Pulitzer consideration. Kevin had never worked for them - they had bought just one picture from him, and they were under pressure to enter their own photostaffers’ work towards journalism’s most prestigious award. The Times, the world’s greatest newspaper, had never won a Pulitzer for photography, despite bagging many for writing, so when nomination time came around, they eventually did submit Kevin’s picture - it was without question the most powerful image they had published that year.
The Times found out that Kevin’s picture had won several days before the 12 April 1994 official announcement. Nancy Lee, The New York Times’s picture editor, and Nancy Buirski, the newspaper’s foreign picture editor, tried to figure out a way to make Kevin available without letting him know about the award. So Buirski called Kevin and asked him to be on standby for the Times. She told him that she wanted him for an assignment, but did not have all the information just yet. Could he just wait for their call, at about three o’clock in the afternoon South African time? Kevin was more than happy to stay at home and be paid a day-rate for it. To celebrate this good fortune, he went and scored Mandrax and dagga and got completely wasted.
At exactly three o’clock, as the names of the winners were announced in New York, the Times patched through a conference call to Johannesburg. Nancy Buirski spoke to him first: ‘Kevin, I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that I don’t have an assignment for you, and the good news is that you’ve just won a Pulitzer for your vulture photograph!’
Nancy Lee recalls that Kevin did not comprehend what they had said, he was mumbling some nonsense, and in New York the two women looked at each other in distress across the desk. They tried again: ‘Kevin, you’ve won a Pulitzer for your picture out of Sudan!’ But Kevin was so stoned that he started babbling on about how bad things were in his life. ‘Ah gee, that’s good, that’s great, but I really needed that job. See, I’ve just wrecked my car and I’m out of money, and ...’
Nancy Lee interrupted him, ‘Kevin, those things are just not going to be important now. I don’t think you heard me, you’ve won a Pulitzer!’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s great, but I really needed that job, ’cause I lost my Reuters gig ... Reuters fired me ...’ ‘I’m sorry, what?’ Lee asked, ‘Kevin, do you understand what I have just said to you? You have just won a Pulitzer Prize, everything else does not matter right now. This is a big deal.’ Buirski and Lee struggled to get Kevin to comprehend the enormity of the moment. ‘Right, yeah,’ he mumbled. He did not get it at all. They gave up trying to get through to him and hung up with the single thought - what were they going to do?
They tracked me down to the KwaZulu-Natal coast, some 600 kilometres from Johannesburg, where I was on assignment. Again, it was a conference call. ‘We have a real problem here. Kevin has just won a Pulitzer and he doesn’t get it. We want to know what is going on. He seems to be drunk,’ Buirski said. My heart sank, thinking Kev must be fucked on buttons, and I mentally ran though a list of possible excuses. It was a warm overcast day, and from where I sat talking to them, I could see the steely grey ocean below. I decided to tell them the truth, figuring they would want to hide Kevin’s addiction as much as I did. I explained what Mandrax was, and what effect the white pipe had on its users. They listened in shocked silence and agreed to put off anyone trying to call Kevin, while I would get Joao and Ken, who were in Johannesburg, to go help him.
Joao was already undressed and sitting in front of the television when I filled him in. He immediately called Kevin and it was clear that he was in no state to speak to anyone. He then phoned Ken and they agreed it best to get Kevin to Ken’s house while they tried to get him straight enough to talk to people. Joao went to collect Kevin from the flatlet he had been staying in since Kathy had kicked him out just days before. Joao hooted at the gate, as they had agreed, and Kevin came out. He was silhouetted against the driveway light and Joao could see that he was swaying as he made his way to the gate, hardly a surprise given that he had been slurring his words on the phone. Kevin blew off Joao’s congratulations and instead harped on about the chaos of his current living conditions and how all his things were still in boxes.
Once at Ken and Monica’s house, close friends and colleagues gathered to celebrate the award. But Kevin was too far gone to do interviews and so Ken kept fielding the calls as news of the Pulitzer spread.
It was the first time the Times had won a Pulitzer Prize for photography, and Nancy Lee was glad that it was for this picture, which was becoming a symbol of famine, and used as such throughout the world. But she also was concerned. She had been really excited about sharing the news of the prize with Kevin, but then came the call in which he did not seem to grasp the significance. As she said later, ‘Then you think, boy, nothing is ever easy, this moment of seeming glory has a taint to it.’ It was a day of celebration at the picture desk at the Times, but there was also a feeling of unease, because of who they thought Kevin was.
The picture had caused a sensation. It was being used in posters for raising funds for aid organizations. Papers and magazines around the world had published it, and the immediate public reaction was to send money to any humanitarian organization that had an operation in Sudan. The heart-wrenching image of a starving, helpless infant being scrutinized by a vulture had inevitably raised the question, ‘What happened to the little girl?’ and, followed close on that, ‘What did the photographer do to help her?’
The barrage of questions had begun to get to Kevin. He could not answer that he had simply left the child there; that the child was not in any direct danger from the vulture, since it is a fact that vultures will never attack anything still showing signs of life. Nor was the child likely to die of starvation, as the feeding-centre, with its ability to administer emergency nutrition, was barely 100 metres away. Kevin at first had told people that he had chased the vulture away, and that he had then gone and sat under a tree to cry. He did not know what happened to the child. But the questions kept coming, and he began to elaborate that he had seen the child get up and walk towards the clinic. It quelled a lot of people’s fears for the child, but it did not get Kevin off the hook of the moral dilemma: after he had shot the picture, why did he not just pick her up and take her to the centre - at most-a few hundred feet away? His job as a journalist to show the plight of the Sudanese had been completed, exceeded, in fact. The bottom line was that Lifeline Sudan had not flown Kevin and Joao in to pick up or feed children - they were flown in to show the worst of the famine and the war, to generate publicity - but the questions remained.
An aid worker I met in Uganda years later, Marcie Auguste, who was working in the nearby town of Kongor when Kevin and Joao were in Sudan, said that all the aid workers who had seen the picture had wondered about the child. But based on their experience, they were sure that the child had been temporarily laid down by its mother and that the little girl was probably alive today. It was comforting for me to hear, but back in 1994, the issues had begun to haunt Kevin. He had not made an effort to assist the child - had he failed a crucial test of his own humanity? Joao maintained that there never was a problem, with the centre so close; the child would have been fine. He had photographed a similar child face down in the dry sand and he had not thought there was a need to assist the child. But then, there had not been the vulture to emphasize the danger.
I am not sure what I would have done in the same circumstances. In different conflict situations, all of us have, at times, stopped photographing to assist wounded civilians. Heidi and I used to work together and she did not believe that journalists were exempt from a duty to assist people. After a few tense discussions, we agreed that if we came across a wounded person, the photographers would have a 60-second window to take pictures before she would start to assist the victim. Every one of the photographers we worked with, including Kevin, respected this, and after our photographic window had elap
sed, we tried to frame the pictures to keep Heidi out of them. And, as Joao said, think of good captions to explain what the white hands were doing in so many of our frames. When we were the only people with a vehicle who could safely cross front-lines and ferry injured people to hospitals, we would do so. But it was not always that simple: there are no fixed parameters for when to intervene and when to keep taking pictures.
When Joao and I had been in Somalia in 1992 for the heart-breaking famine, neither of us had personally picked up a single sick or dying child, though we had seen hundreds. We would get our Somali bodyguards to pick up starving people and load them into the back of our pick-up, but we never personally laid a hand on a single child. We watched them die in front of us and took pictures. I had felt utterly impotent as I took pictures of a starving father as he realized that his last living child had died on his lap, watching through the lens as he closed her eyes and then walked away.
Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for. But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released.
14
‘SHOW US YOUR DEAD’
I hope I die with the best fucking news pic of all time on my neg. - it wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise ...
Ken Oosterbroek’s diary, Friday, 20 May 1988
18 April 1994
The youths were silent as they vainly tried to fend off the soldiers’ heavy military boots thudding against their heads and bodies. I climbed on to the table in the tiny room, trying to get a view of the assault as Joao and then London-based freelance photographer Mikey Persson went to their knees, their flashes firing intermittently. Shit, I thought, they’re getting frames and I can’t see a thing. I could just hear the muffled thump of leather on flesh and the occasional soldier’s curse. The blueuniformed South African peace-keeping soldiers had stormed the house, an ANC hideout in one of the dilapidated homes in the dead zone, and captured the youths with their battered AK-47 assault rifles inside. It was the second day of the National Peace-Keeping Force’s full deployment in the township. They were tasked with separating the warring factions, and the idea was that this transitional military force, selected from the liberation guerrilla armies, the homeland security forces and the South African Defence Force, would have more legitimacy than the apartheid state’s police or defence forces. But they found themselves jeered, stoned and shot at by both township residents and hostel-dwellers, both of whom felt that the peace-keepers were biased in favour of their enemy. They were suffering the peace-keepers’ curse - trained to kill but tasked to pacify.
These peace-keepers clearly thought it their right to kick their prisoners. The young fighters, by their silent resignation to the punishment, accepted that being assaulted was their due. Despite wanting to get pictures of the assault, we photographers did not find it at all extraordinary either - it was the South African way. The irony was that many of these black peace-keepers had fled the country to join guerrilla armies to escape the police brutality they had suffered during the suppression of the 1976 Soweto uprising, all the way through to the death squads of the 80s and 90s.
The peace-keepers ceased the beating and ordered us to get out. Within minutes they emerged, displaying the weapons they had seized, and pushing the three bleeding self-defence unit members ahead of them. By now more ANC supporters had gathered in the overgrown yard. They were using a combination of threats and pleas in an effort to negotiate the release of their comrades, but more importantly they wanted the weapons returned. The peace-keepers were having no part of that discussion and as the confrontation became more aggressive, the heavily armed soldiers took up defensive positions opposite the apparently unarmed kids. We quickly moved behind the line of kneeling blue uniforms, framing the shot in case they did open fire on the comrades. But the kids decided it was a losing battle and backed down. We followed the soldiers as they herded their prisoners through the no-man’s-land of the dead zone towards their armoured vehicles, parked in Inkatha territory.
Within minutes, the peace-keepers were under fire from the ANC side - an unequivocal response to the arrest of their fellow fighters. The peace-keepers’ commander, a white captain, barked out orders for his men to deploy along the street. We followed closely as the soldiers made their way towards the source of the gunfire. They crouched against the meagre cover afforded by fences and walls, and we followed. Suddenly the captain was screaming at us, telling us to leave the area or he would have us shot. We all leapt up, breaking cover and charging up to him, entirely forgetting the danger of standing up in the middle of a skirmish. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are to threaten us?’ Joao shouted, poking the podgy officer in the chest with his forefinger. Jim and I were also shouting at him, while Ken, towering over all of us, was yelling too. The officer was clearly startled at being mobbed by civilians, brandishing cameras and righteous indignation. He was from the old school where anyone in uniform held power over mere civilians. But the old days were gone, and we were vehement in letting him know that there no longer was a State of Emergency that prohibited journalists from being at such scenes. But it was more our combined aggression than our legal right to be there that made him back down. The scene must have bemused the ANC gunmen who had been firing in our direction, because despite our little group being an easy target, no further shots were fired. Good street theatre.
Everyone calmed down and I took the captain to the side of the road to discuss our presence. He maintained that we were getting in the way of his men, endangering them. I convinced him that we would stay behind his men and that we had all done this before, in wars around the globe. We ended up with a reasonable compromise, but the fire-fight was over - the pause to watch our little drama had defused the situation. The peace-keepers were now ready to leave the area and that left us stranded deep in Inkatha territory. Inkatha was not very accepting of the presence of journalists - they were in fact openly hostile, and for us to now have to walk out of Inkatha’s Ulundi stronghold, across a kilometre of the dead zone into ANC territory, would have been extremely dangerous. I asked my new acquaintance - Captain Alberts - if I could get a ride out in the armoured vehicle. The plan was to go for our car so that I could return to collect my colleagues who refused to ride with the peace-keepers, a principled stand of no significance, which simply meant I had to drive across the front-line twice.
Back in the ANC area, things had quieted down. Some of the foreign photographers had brought in hand-held radio scanners that could pick up the police frequencies. While standard equipment in the US and many other places, the scanners were illegal in South Africa. During the early days of the war, Kevin had managed to get a scanner from a towtrucker friend of his. It may have been faulty, but in any case we never figured out how to use it. But the new ones that had come in were great and since most of the police message traffic was in Afrikaans, we local boys were essential if the scanners were to be useful. While listening to the various police frequencies, we overheard a message that sounded as though a policeman had been killed. But the static, crackle and police verbal shorthand meant we missed where it had taken place. Ken, Joao, Jim and I began cruising the area in the car, frantically trying to pick up an intelligible reference to where the dead cop was. After half an hour of fruitless driving and listening, we joked about going to the police station and asking them directly. Right, maybe Ken - known for his lack of tact - should be the one to go in. Joao imitated Ken’s gruff voice: ‘Show us your dead!’ We all laughed, then somehow Ken figured out where the incident had occurred. We raced to an open field next to the cemetery in Kathlehong and found three wounded black teenagers lying on the ground, surrounded by policemen. The cops were surprised to see us and said the kids had fired at them and that they had all been wounded when police returned fire. It was unclear what had happened, but there was a strange atmosphere; something weird had gone down, but no
one was about to tell us about it. We took pictures and, vaguely disappointed (no pictures of dead cops), returned to the dead zone in Khumalo Street.
There was a lull and dozens of journalists had gathered in the side streets waiting for the next phase in the action. There was an air of expectancy: it was clear that Thokoza was gearing up for a major battle. I was thirsty, a little bored, and decided to make the dash across Khumalo Street to buy us cold drinks, which meant risking 30 metres of possible sniper fire. In retrospect it was stupid to risk getting shot for a Coke but at the time I felt that the risk was negligible and, in any event, the crossing was uneventful. I bought drinks from a small tuck shop, but they did not have enough change. ‘Never mind, keep it,’ I said. ‘No, I will find you change,’ the shop-owner insisted. It was just a couple of rand and I said to keep the change and then sprinted back across to where the guys were waiting. Both Ken and Kevin took pictures of me racing across the tar, a big grin on my face and bottles of Coke in my hands. We swallowed the cold drinks greedily, then the shop-owner came charging across the road with my change. I laughed and again told him that he should keep it; finally he accepted the money and ran back again. He had wanted to make sure I did not think he was trying to cheat me by pretending to not have change. It was just another of the quirky things that happened amidst the chaos and carnage, small displays of goodwill, humour and outright craziness.
The Bang-Bang Club Page 18