The Bang-Bang Club (25 page)

Kevin went back to his car, where he had a ‘ready-made’ white pipe waiting. On the way back to the Reuters office, he failed to negotiate a turn and crashed the car into a garage door and a wall, hitting his head against the windscreen. When the startled house-owner came out to find out what was happening and assist if need be, she saw Kevin swaying next to the car, blood pouring down his face. She started screaming at him to keep away from her. Kevin was not looking his dashing best: the haunted artist had degraded into a wasted-druggie look. The police arrived - the woman’s hysteria and Kevin’s usual belligerence towards the police resulted in Kevin getting involved in a tussle with a policeman. The police also found a bag of dagga and the used bottle neck from the white pipe in the car. When Patrick got to the Brixton police station, the first question he was asked was, ‘How can you work with people who are stoned and drunk?’

Patrick was allowed into the cell where he found Kevin, still wasted. Kevin told him that he had been beaten up by the cops. Patrick left angrily, having retrieved the Mandela film. Patrick then called Kathy, even though he knew that she and Kevin were no longer together. She rushed to the police station, where they would not allow her to see Kevin, even though she had the money to pay his bail. The police insisted he had to spend the night in jail. Early the next morning, Kevin looked dreadful; he had not been allowed to wash, and his face was
caked with dry blood from the gash above his forehead. He told Kathy that he had slept on the cold concrete floor and that he had not been given even a blanket. He was charged and a court appearance date was set; Kathy was then allowed to post his bail. She felt guilty about having kicked Kevin out and that he was now in such a bad way. She still cared for him and allowed him to stay at her flat for the day while he recovered. That night Kathy suggested that he seek professional help for his addiction, but Kevin insisted he could beat the drugs on his own. In the days leading up to the accident and arrest, Kevin had undoubtedly been coming to work stoned. Judith, a friend at Reuters, recalls that there was a general feeling that he was unravelling, losing it; when people in the office heard about his accident, the collective feeling was that he gone too far.

What happened at Reuters following the arrest is not completely clear. I had always believed that it was common knowledge that they had fired Kevin after the incident, but Patrick and the Reuters bureau chief, Rodney Pinder, offer different versions of what happened. One version had Patrick firing Kevin the night of the accident in a fit of anger, and then relenting the next day - he had seemingly started having second thoughts, thinking he had been too hasty and that maybe he should give Kevin another chance. In another version Pinder insisted that there was no place for someone like Kevin at the agency, and Kevin was fired. Pinder himself now says that he suggested they fire Kevin, but had left it up to Patrick, who had thought that they needed Kevin, as he would probably bring in good pictures over the election period. Colleagues who had been in the office were sure that Kevin had been fired. Kevin was also convinced that he had been fired. In any event, whether the confusion led Kevin to believe he had been fired, or he really had been, the outcome was the same: it added to Kevin’s instability at a time when he need something to hold on to.

At
The New York Times
, the picture editors were pondering over whether to submit Kevin’s vulture picture for Pulitzer consideration. Kevin had never worked for them - they had bought just one picture from him, and they were under pressure to enter their own photostaffers’
work towards journalism’s most prestigious award. The
Times
, the world’s greatest newspaper, had never won a Pulitzer for photography, despite bagging many for writing, so when nomination time came around, they eventually did submit Kevin’s picture - it was without question the most powerful image they had published that year.

The
Times
found out that Kevin’s picture had won several days before the 12 April 1994 official announcement. Nancy Lee,
The New York Times
’s picture editor, and Nancy Buirski, the newspaper’s foreign picture editor, tried to figure out a way to make Kevin available without letting him know about the award. So Buirski called Kevin and asked him to be on standby for the
Times
. She told him that she wanted him for an assignment, but did not have all the information just yet. Could he just wait for their call, at about three o’clock in the afternoon South African time? Kevin was more than happy to stay at home and be paid a day-rate for it. To celebrate this good fortune, he went and scored Mandrax and dagga and got completely wasted.

At exactly three o’clock, as the names of the winners were announced in New York, the
Times
patched through a conference call to Johannesburg. Nancy Buirski spoke to him first: ‘Kevin, I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that I don’t have an assignment for you, and the good news is that you’ve just won a Pulitzer for your vulture photograph!’

Nancy Lee recalls that Kevin did not comprehend what they had said, he was mumbling some nonsense, and in New York the two women looked at each other in distress across the desk. They tried again: ‘Kevin, you’ve won a Pulitzer for your picture out of Sudan!’ But Kevin was so stoned that he started babbling on about how bad things were in his life. ‘Ah gee, that’s good, that’s great, but I really needed that job. See, I’ve just wrecked my car and I’m out of money, and ...’

Nancy Lee interrupted him, ‘Kevin, those things are just not going to be important now. I don’t think you heard me, you’ve won a Pulitzer!’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s great, but I really needed that job, ’cause I
lost my Reuters gig ... Reuters fired me ...’ ‘I’m sorry, what?’ Lee asked, ‘Kevin, do you understand what I have just said to you? You have just won a Pulitzer Prize, everything else does not matter right now. This is a big deal.’ Buirski and Lee struggled to get Kevin to comprehend the enormity of the moment. ‘Right, yeah,’ he mumbled. He did not get it at all. They gave up trying to get through to him and hung up with the single thought - what were they going to do?

They tracked me down to the KwaZulu-Natal coast, some 600 kilometres from Johannesburg, where I was on assignment. Again, it was a conference call. ‘We have a real problem here. Kevin has just won a Pulitzer and he doesn’t get it. We want to know what is going on. He seems to be drunk,’ Buirski said. My heart sank, thinking Kev must be fucked on buttons, and I mentally ran though a list of possible excuses. It was a warm overcast day, and from where I sat talking to them, I could see the steely grey ocean below. I decided to tell them the truth, figuring they would want to hide Kevin’s addiction as much as I did. I explained what Mandrax was, and what effect the white pipe had on its users. They listened in shocked silence and agreed to put off anyone trying to call Kevin, while I would get Joao and Ken, who were in Johannesburg, to go help him.

Joao was already undressed and sitting in front of the television when I filled him in. He immediately called Kevin and it was clear that he was in no state to speak to anyone. He then phoned Ken and they agreed it best to get Kevin to Ken’s house while they tried to get him straight enough to talk to people. Joao went to collect Kevin from the flatlet he had been staying in since Kathy had kicked him out just days before. Joao hooted at the gate, as they had agreed, and Kevin came out. He was silhouetted against the driveway light and Joao could see that he was swaying as he made his way to the gate, hardly a surprise given that he had been slurring his words on the phone. Kevin blew off Joao’s congratulations and instead harped on about the chaos of his current living conditions and how all his things were still in boxes.

Once at Ken and Monica’s house, close friends and colleagues
gathered to celebrate the award. But Kevin was too far gone to do interviews and so Ken kept fielding the calls as news of the Pulitzer spread.

It was the first time the
Times
had won a Pulitzer Prize for photography, and Nancy Lee was glad that it was for this picture, which was becoming a symbol of famine, and used as such throughout the world. But she also was concerned. She had been really excited about sharing the news of the prize with Kevin, but then came the call in which he did not seem to grasp the significance. As she said later, ‘Then you think, boy, nothing is ever easy, this moment of seeming glory has a taint to it.’ It was a day of celebration at the picture desk at the
Times
, but there was also a feeling of unease, because of who they thought Kevin was.

The picture had caused a sensation. It was being used in posters for raising funds for aid organizations. Papers and magazines around the world had published it, and the immediate public reaction was to send money to any humanitarian organization that had an operation in Sudan. The heart-wrenching image of a starving, helpless infant being scrutinized by a vulture had inevitably raised the question, ‘What happened to the little girl?’ and, followed close on that, ‘What did the photographer do to help her?’

The barrage of questions had begun to get to Kevin. He could not answer that he had simply left the child there; that the child was not in any direct danger from the vulture, since it is a fact that vultures will never attack anything still showing signs of life. Nor was the child likely to die of starvation, as the feeding-centre, with its ability to administer emergency nutrition, was barely 100 metres away. Kevin at first had told people that he had chased the vulture away, and that he had then gone and sat under a tree to cry. He did not know what happened to the child. But the questions kept coming, and he began to elaborate that he had seen the child get up and walk towards the clinic. It quelled a lot of people’s fears for the child, but it did not get Kevin off the hook of the moral dilemma: after he had shot the picture, why did he not just pick her up and take her to the centre - at most-a few hundred feet
away? His job as a journalist to show the plight of the Sudanese had been completed, exceeded, in fact. The bottom line was that Lifeline Sudan had not flown Kevin and Joao in to pick up or feed children - they were flown in to show the worst of the famine and the war, to generate publicity - but the questions remained.

An aid worker I met in Uganda years later, Marcie Auguste, who was working in the nearby town of Kongor when Kevin and Joao were in Sudan, said that all the aid workers who had seen the picture had wondered about the child. But based on their experience, they were sure that the child had been temporarily laid down by its mother and that the little girl was probably alive today. It was comforting for me to hear, but back in 1994, the issues had begun to haunt Kevin. He had not made an effort to assist the child - had he failed a crucial test of his own humanity? Joao maintained that there never was a problem, with the centre so close; the child would have been fine. He had photographed a similar child face down in the dry sand and he had not thought there was a need to assist the child. But then, there had not been the vulture to emphasize the danger.

I am not sure what I would have done in the same circumstances. In different conflict situations, all of us have, at times, stopped photographing to assist wounded civilians. Heidi and I used to work together and she did not believe that journalists were exempt from a duty to assist people. After a few tense discussions, we agreed that if we came across a wounded person, the photographers would have a 60-second window to take pictures before she would start to assist the victim. Every one of the photographers we worked with, including Kevin, respected this, and after our photographic window had elapsed, we tried to frame the pictures to keep Heidi out of them. And, as Joao said, think of good captions to explain what the white hands were doing in so many of our frames. When we were the only people with a vehicle who could safely cross front-lines and ferry injured people to hospitals, we would do so. But it was not always that simple: there are no fixed parameters for when to intervene and when to keep taking pictures.

When Joao and I had been in Somalia in 1992 for the heart-breaking
famine, neither of us had personally picked up a single sick or dying child, though we had seen hundreds. We would get our Somali bodyguards to pick up starving people and load them into the back of our pick-up, but we never personally laid a hand on a single child. We watched them die in front of us and took pictures. I had felt utterly impotent as I took pictures of a starving father as he realized that his last living child had died on his lap, watching through the lens as he closed her eyes and then walked away.

Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for. But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released.

14

‘SHOW US YOUR DEAD’

I hope I die with the best fucking news pic of all time on my neg. - it wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise ...

Ken Oosterbroek’s diary, Friday, 20 May 1988