Here is the true story of Photojournalist, its a story of his Life, Achievement and his Death. (Source: http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/94/6/apartheid.asp)

Eye on Apartheid

by Judith Matloff
Matloff, a Reuters correspondent based in Johannesburg, was Kevin Carter's housemate, colleague, and friend.

Last April, the South African photographer Kevin Carter was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his picture of a well-fed vulture stalking a starving Sudanese girl. In May, he came to New York to receive his award. Two months later, the thirty-three-year-old news photographer connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his red pickup truck and gassed himself to death. Journalists who had buried colleagues killed covering South Africa's turmoil resumed their grim role of pallbearers. Carter himself had barely missed being killed covering incidents in Tokoza township, the township where his best friend and colleague Ken Oosterbroek was later shot dead.

Carter had been documenting the political turmoil in his country since 1983, when he was hired as a photographer by the Sunday Express. His first Time cover came the next year. Thereafter, he worked for most leading South African newspapers -- The Star, The Sunday Tribune, and the progressive Rand Daily Mail, which later became The Weekly Mail -- and finally Reuters.

The violence seemed to affect Carter more than it did other colleagues who managed to shrug off with joints and jokes what they recorded on film. Returning from particularly upsetting assignments, he would often cry, or try to drink or drug himself into oblivion. Friends grew used to his 3 A.M. phone calls, rambling about suicide. He said that after shooting the Pulitzer-winning picture, he "sat under a tree and cried and chain-smoked. I couldn't distance myself from the horror of what I saw."

Carter's private demons were closing in on him when he returned to South Africa from New York. His suicide note said he was "depressed . . . without phone . . . money for rent . . . money for child support . . . money for debts . . . money! ! !" But he also lived with the demons familiar to all those whose profession makes them witness to horror. "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen."