[I stumbled upon this group's story while researching the work of Joao Silva, a New York Times contract photographer whose work recently caught my eye, and thought it worth sharing.]
The nickname “Bang-Bang Club” refers to a group of four South African photographers–Greg Marinovich, Joao Silva, Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbroek–known at the time for their high-profile work in South Africa during the most violent days of the Apartheid era. From a profile by The Guardian in 2004:
They were not really a club, more colleagues whose jobs and friendships overlapped, but the nickname stuck and they won reputations for courage bordering on recklessness.
Reckless though they may have been, the Bang-Bang Club is often credited for having forced the world to digest–via the group’s stunning and often graphic imagery–the horrific reality that was life in South Africa during the final struggle for power and human rights that was the end of the decades-long era. A struggle about which relatively little was known, on account of the South African government’s control of national media.
The photographers of the Bang-Bang Club would go on to win countless awards for their work in South Africa, other conflicts and places of interest around the world. Two members of the group, Carter and Marinovich, would be awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their work in Sudan and South Africa, respectively. Carter’s winning photo can be seen here, and Marinovich’s here.
Unfortunately, the success of the Bang-Bang Club came at the very highest price. While photographing a 1994 firefight in Johannesburg, Ken Oosterbroek was shot and killed. Friend and colleague Joao Silva witnessed the shooting from meters away and memorialized the moment with his own lens (photos here). Compounding the group’s loss was the subsequent suicide of Kevin Carter, who had recently been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography when he ran a hose from his car’s exhaust in through a cracked window, wrote a few farewell notes and drifted off to sleep.
It’s also worth noting that the group has not been summarily praised. The Bang-Bang Club and Journalism Ethics by Jessica Powers questions whether each of these men “had failed to pass some basic test of his fundamental humanity” by bearing witness to unspeakable acts of violence and injustice but refusing to assist victims. And while all of the members of the club would be subjected to public scrutiny, none received more outright criticism than Kevin Carter. From The Photojournalist’s Dilemma, a case file from the Global Ethics Consortium:
In the village of Ayod in Sudan, Carter photographed masses of starving people at a feeding station. Overwhelmed by the endless misery he saw, Carter wandered away from the feeding station into the bush. Following sounds of soft whimpering, he came upon a tiny Sudanese child, emaciated from starvation, crawling toward the feeding center. Carter decided to photograph the child. As he was doing so, a well-fed vulture landed a few feet away and began to stalk the child. Carter photographed the vulture stalking the child for several minutes, patiently hoping that the vulture would spread its wings, thereby enabling Carter to get a more dramatic shot.. It did not and Carter eventually shooed the bird away. He sat beneath a tree and cried, watching as the child continued to struggle toward the center. It is not known if the child survived.
Carter’s powerful image became an immediate symbol of Africa’s desperation, and won Carter the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Photography. Although acclaimed by many, much of the response was critical for publishing this photo and awarding it the Pulitzer Prize. Carter was angrily criticized because he took the picture but did not assist the child, although she was one among thousands of refugees crawling toward the center. Some, however, hailed Carter’s photo as a powerful catalyst that triggered world response to the famine in the Sudan, resulting in raised awareness and substantial contributions for famine relief.
I can’t do justice to the lengthy and complex story of these four men in a single post. If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend Silva and Marinovich’s book, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War. And while I haven’t yet seen it, Dan Krauss’s documentary The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang-Bang Club looks promising.
In addition to the above, I’ve managed to collect a number of reference sites, all of which I’ve tagged accordingly in my del.icio.us collection.