Two months later, Carter, at the age of 33, took his own life. On April 18, 1994, nine days before South African first democratic elections, the Bang Bang Club were covering the violence in Thokoza township when Oosterbroek was killed in the crossfire between hostel dwellers and a South African peacekeeping force. Petersburg Times in Florida wrote about Carter: 'The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.' After the photo was published, hundreds of people wrote The New York Times to ask if the child had survived, which lead to the newspaper publishing a special editor's note saying that according to Cartner, the girl had enough strength to resume her walk to the feeding center, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. Carter, who waiting 20 minutes for the vulture to spread his wings (it didn't) and eventually shooed it away, was criticized for not helping the tiny girl, who appeared to be not much older than a toddler. In May 1994, Carter won the Pulitzer for a picture first published in The New York Times of a starving Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding center while a vulture stood on the ground a few feet away, waiting for her to die. The photograph won Marinovich a Pultizer prize. On September 15th, 1990, Marinovich took a series of photographs for Associated Press which included the image of an ANC supporter hacking at a burning man.

Before the world truly understood the horror of apartheid, its violence had been exposed by the work of these extraordinary young men. Before the world knew who Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva were, everyone knew their photographs.

The bang bang club book