Why Aren't Journalists Sadder? (Part One)

On the evening of July 27 1994 the South African photojournalist Kevin Carter drove to Parkmore a suburb of Johannesburg where he had spent time as a child After parking his car beside a play area he had frequented while growing up he attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe of his vehicle and ran it through the passenger side window before reentering the car and lying down inside until the fumes overcame him His suicide note made reference to a number of potential contributing factors from financial distress to the recent shooting death of his friend the photographer Ken Oosterbroek to quotthe vivid memories of killings ampamp corpses ampamp anger ampamp painof starving or wounded childrenquot The latter point is for Carter was best known he had after all just four months prior been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for his chilling photograph of a young girl collapsing amid the Sudanese famine as a vulture waited for her nearbyJust a matter of months before his death as described by Scott MacLeod writing in Time Carter was living something of the highlife Despite a long history of depression including a previous suicide attempt Carter was a man about town in New York during the spring of 1994 MacLeod describes Carter being hounded at New York restaurants for autographs and all the quotpretty girls falling for himquot The latter point would not have surprised the essayist Joseph Epstein When writing about his friend the novelist Saul Bellow and seeking to explain the dour Bellow39s seemingly inexplicable success with women Epstein improved on the Kissingerian dictum musing that quotliterary fame with a certain kind of woman had much the same effectquot as political influence However one imagines this newfound glitz might have seemed misplaced to Carter there must have been a curious juxtaposition in being invited to one bubbly soiree after another on account of a fame achieved through chronicling famine and social unrest death and sufferingAlthough early reactions to Carter39s suicide likely overstated the role that his journalism played in the decision to take his life and in doing so failed properly to consider his previous 1980 suicide attempt that predated his journalism entirely the story raises an interesting question And it is a question I have frequently posed to other journalists and writers To what degree does covering deeply unsettling subjects take a toll on one39s wellbeingAlong these lines I recall in August of 2019 phoning my friend Matt Rainey Rainey if one recalls is the immensely talented photojournalist who won 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his After the Fire series and he was also a member of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting I had just returned from a whirlwind 46 hours in Atlanta where I was shuffled from one location to the next to conduct a series of oneonone sitdown interviews with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and the leadership of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation The conversations had each turned to gang crime with a particular focus on some of its most pernicious manifestations in elder abuse and human trafficking The stories were deeply unsettling and this was paired with a hectic travel schedule chasing around the politicians can get tiring that was beginning to catch up with meI recall Rainey telling me about the comfort he has found in being married to someone who really understands the toll his work can take on him as well as the importance of his religious faith If anyone would know it39s Matt Second only perhaps to Richard Drew39s AP photograph of 91139s quotThe Falling Manquot Rainey39s After the Fire portrayal of the two burn victims Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos is among the most haunting or rather persistently unforgettable works of photography ever produced But this as they say all good things do came at a price As Rainey described to me when I first spoke with him for an interview in 2018 quotI39d be driving home from the burn unit at ten o39clock in the evening and I39d be sifting through all the emotions involved in the day and I would start weepingquotHowever as he said then quotthe journalism community and the photojournalism community operate the same way You build a small network of friends and those friends are there for life They really help you through the hard timesquot Having also covered the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and the fallout from the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings Rainey would have had ample cause to seek out support along these linesOn the subject of this small network of friends just as perhaps bankers have banking friends I have writer friends So I mentioned the other day to one of my other friends the author Allen Hornblum who is most famous for his 1998 book Acres of Skin an exposamp233 on the human experimentation that took place at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia from 1951 to 1974 that I was planning to do a piece on this topic of keeping one39s head in journalism He was kind enough to share his two cents on this question quotI don39t get depressed I get angry that keeps me in the battle to expose the wrongs that have been committedquotSo Rainey Hornblum all of us we have our ways to get byClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNetamp160

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Why Aren't Journalists Sadder? (Part One)

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Erich J. Prince

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