Kevin Carter committed suicide four months after winning the Pulitzer. His photo, the one you know, even if you didn\u2019t realize it, is of a starving African child being watched over ominously by a vulture. Death appears imminent. I was only eight years old when the picture came out. I didn\u2019t see it then. I didn\u2019t see it until I was grown up and couldn\u2019t remember what it was like to be a kid anymore. Not really. If I try to remember what it was like being eight, it\u2019s like being a kid and trying to imagine what it would be like to be an adult. Impossible. Or at best, inaccurate. Our memories, like our imaginations, are constantly sculpted by the reality of the present. Society too, is constantly augmenting our memories with inaccuracies. Norman Rockwell comes to mind. Bleaching an entire era fraught with discourse, fear, and inequities, with his happy-go-lucky paintings. His paintings conjure feelings that are comfortably nostalgic. A yearning for a reality that never actually existed. The pictures hang in places that want to appear wholesome but instead contort themselves into a falsehood. No one has Kevin Carter\u2019s picture hanging up in their house or office. It\u2019s not at my dentist\u2019s. I don\u2019t want it to be, but that doesn\u2019t mean it shouldn\u2019t. The image and memory were powerful enough to kill its capturer, so maybe we as humans can\u2019t handle it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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