The media

1 )The song of Manic Street Preachers- Kevin Carter

"Kevin Carter"

Hi Time magazine hi Pulitzer Prize
Tribal scars in Technicolor
Bang bang club AK 47 hour

Kevin Carter

Hi Time magazine hi Pulitzer Prize
Vulture stalked white piped lie forever
Wasted your life in black and white

Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter

Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter

The elephant is so ugly he sleeps his head
Machetes his bed Kevin Carter kaffir lover forever
Click click click click click
Click himself under

Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter 

(Some interpretations of this song: here )

2) The book

 

The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War is an autobiographical book about the Bang-Bang Club. It was written by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, two of the four members of the club. The group's two surviving members recount their political, emotional, and personal journeys through these violent years as South Africa moved toward democracy. The book was published in English on 20 September 2000.

 

 3) The documentary

"The short but provocative documentary “The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club,” which Cinemax airs at 6 p.m. Thursday, attempts to explain why Carter committed suicide months after winning the ultimate journalistic accolade and shortly after the death of his best friend.

Given that it’s only a half-hour long, it’s surprising how thorough this Academy Award-nominated documentary is regarding Carter’s life and times. The only criticism one can make is to wish the film were longer, given that Carter’s colleagues and friends clearly have many stories to tell, not only about the gifted photojournalist but also about the birth of post-apartheid South Africa.

Viewers learn about Carter’s membership in South African journalism’s “Bang Bang Club,” a band of elite photographers who documented the tumultuous final days of the apartheid regime, often at great personal risk. Carter and his colleagues were witnesses to some of South Africa’s most horrific and frightening violence, and the photos they took while pursuing that dangerous story garnered them notice all over the world. But acting as witnesses in that place, in that era, took its toll."

The review from: here

 

4)The movie

 

The Bang Bang Club is a drama based on the true-life experiences of four combat photographers capturing the final days of apartheid in South Africa.

Director:

Steven Silver

Writers:

Greg Marinovich (book), João Silva (book),

Steven Silver

(screenplay)

Stars:

Ryan Phillippe, Malin Akerman, Taylor Kitsch 

information from: here


Closely discussed before: here

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The Bang Bang Club (movie)

"All of the people that say that it's our job to sit there and watch people die"

The Bang Bang Club review by "The Guardian":

The screening of The Bang Bang Club at the Tribeca film festival gave additional pause for thought, coming as it did in the same week as the deaths of photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya.

Based on the real-life experiences of four photojournalists covering the tribal violence between Inkatha and ANC supporters in the early 90s, writer/director Steven Silver admitted the tragedy had "cast a long shadow over the film". Indeed, it's hard to watch the dramatic conclusion and not be chilled by the similarity in which Hetherington and Hondros lost their lives.

Silver uses the backdrop of the conflict in South Africa to explore the relationships between the four men and the subjects they shoot. Frustratingly, though, while the film poses pertinent questions about when to put the camera down, it shies away from delving deeper into these moral dilemmas and the emotional strain faced by combat photographers. Instead we're introduced to a testosterone-fuelled world in which dodging bullets is just another way of getting kicks before the partying starts.

Much of this is down to the film's crisis of identity, attempting to mix in a more mainstream, action-adventure feel while sustaining the gravitas demanded by its subject matter. It falters on both accounts and, by focusing on the power of photography, the film feels more like a series of snapshots than a coherent narrative of a pivotal moment in South Africa's history.

Ryan Phillippe as Greg Marinovich and Taylor Kitsch as Kevin Carter are both charismatic leads – but rather than complement each other, their stories compete. Kitsch's performance as the gifted but self-destructive Carter is by far the most compelling, yet seems peripheral in an ensemble setup that never really allows room to scratch beneath the characters' surface machismo. There is undoubtedly a story here worth telling – made all the more poignant by the fact one of the Bang Bang Club members, João Silva, lost both his legs last year on assignment in Afghanistan. It's just a shame the accomplished cinematography isn't matched by a script that lets the true bravery and accomplishments of combat photojournalists shine through, as they deserve."

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The Bang Bang Club

"You are making a visual here. But inside something is screaming, "My God.'"

~Kevin Carter

Though legendary in photojournalism circles, the Bang Bang Club never formally existed. It was really more of a bond among four young photographers — Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva — united by their ideals, their photography and the historical events unfolding in South Africa in the 1990s.

Their bond was formed in the field, where injustice and death lurked. It was a camaraderie that came from the constant experience of mortal danger — Mr. Oosterbroek was killed during a gun battle in April 1994. They also shared a mutual understanding of how important it was to document the tumultuous events unfolding in front of them as apartheid gave way and South Africans struggled to form a new government. It was a battle most brutally waged in townships populated mainly by poor blacks.

“Amazing how often these guys were shooting pictures of people committing murder, burning people alive,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times. The Times’s bureau chief in Johannesburg from 1992 until 1995, he often worked with Mr. Marinovich.

Mr. Marinovich was fairly new to photojournalism in 1991 when he first photographed the killing of a man. “I had been too scared to say anything to try to stop it,” he said, “and so that really disturbed me about myself and who I thought I was at the moment.”

A month later Mr. Marinovich came across a very similar situation. But this time he did try to intervene, with no success. The series of photographs showed supporters of South Africa’s African National Congress burning alive a man they believed to be a Zulu spy. Mr. Marinovich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for those pictures the following year.

The group routinely covered situations where it “was not a healthy place to be a witness,” as Mr. Keller put it.

That is the core of what the Bang Bang Club is remembered for: bearing witness. Mr. Carter’s picture of a starving Sudanese girl with a vulture nearby, first published in The Times, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

When an article about some of the photographers was published under the title “The Bang Bang Paparazzi,” the group was offended. “The kind of journalism, the photography we do — it’s real lives; you know, people living, people dying,” Mr. Silva said. In a later article, the writer renamed the group the Bang Bang Club. Then, after Mr. Oosterbroek’s death and Mr. Carter’s suicide in July 1994, Mr. Silva and Mr. Marinovich wrote a book, “The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots From a Hidden War” (2000).

The book contains scenes familiar to South Africans like Steven Silver, a director who is making it into a movie. He remembers the fearless photographers. “Bullets would start to fly and everyone would scramble and you would see these guys jump into the middle of it and wade right into the center of it,” Mr. Silver recalled.

Earlier this year, Mr. Silver, Mr. Silva (being played by Neels Van Jaarsveld) and Mr. Marinovich (being played by Ryan Phillippe) were once again on common ground with others who survived the conflict. During filming, people rushed out of their homes with magazines showing Mr. Marinovich’s photograph of the burning man. In some scenes, residents of the townships played themselves, as extras.

Everyone involved helped make the film as authentic as possible, which was Mr. Silver’s key concern. Mr. Marinovich and Mr. Silva were brought on as consultants to ensure that the details were accurate. “It was a lot more difficult than they had anticipated,” he said.

“It wasn’t that long ago; the history is still very much alive — in the people of the townships as much as in Greg and Joao.”

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João Silva - an unbroken man

João Silva is a war photographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the last working member of the Bang-Bang Club. Silva has worked in Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. On 23 October 2010, Silva stepped on a landmine while on patrol with US soldiers in Kandahar, Afghanistan and lost his left leg below the knee, and his right leg above it.

In October 2010, on assignment in Afghanistan for the New York Times, Silva was on a combat patrol outside Kandahar, embedded with members of the 4th Infantry Division. Entering a blasted and desolate compound, he was following two soldiers and a bomb-sniffing dog on a narrow trail through mounds of rubble. The recent NATO troop surge had driven the Taliban away from direct confrontation while greatly increasing their use of IEDs and land mines. Silva and Times reporter Carlotta Gall had come to document that shift.
"As fate would have it, I found exactly the story we were looking for," recalls Silva. "I stood on it."
He remembers a metallic ting and a deafening bang, and he was instantly on the ground, covered in dust and blood. The soldiers ran back, dragged him out of the kill zone and began administering first aid. He couldn't feel anything, except, oddly, in his shooting wrist, and Silva managed to squeeze off three more frames before he dropped his camera. Then he looked down at his legs. "I could see them dangling and shredded," he says. "I knew they were gone."


The explosion had destroyed Silva's left leg below the knee, and his right leg above it. But he had also been very lucky that day. The antipersonnel mine he'd stepped on was rigged to a second device, a metal canister filled with 30 pounds of homemade explosives that hadn't detonated. "If it had gone off, they wouldn't have found enough of me to put in a matchbox," he says.

He stayed conscious throughout the entire ordeal. The medics applied tourniquets and let him smoke a cigarette, and he used Gall's phone to call his wife of 25 years, Viv, in South Africa. "I told her, 'My legs are gone, but I think I'll be all right.' She said, 'Please don't die,' and I told her, 'I'll try not to."

Silva's career began during the political violence that wracked South Africa as apartheid ended. In the early 1990s, Silva was a member of a small group of young photographers dubbed the Bang-Bang Club. In 1994, while covering street clashes, the group was caught in a crossfire and Silva's best friend, Greg Marinovich, was wounded, shot three times. Another friend, Ken Oosterbroek, a 31-year-old photographer for the Johannesburg Star, was killed. Silva was unscathed. Afterward, he felt guilty that he had paused to photograph his friend lying dead at his feet.

Another Bang-Bang Club member, Kevin Carter, later won the Pulitzer Prize for a photo of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. The public condemnation Carter received, calling him a vulture for not helping the child, may have pushed him over the edge. Three months later, he ran a hose from the tailpipe of his pickup through the window and asphyxiated himself.
"It's not only the guilt of survival; it's also the guilt of what you've witnessed," says Silva. "So there's a lot of guilt associated with this. There's no way you can avoid it."

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Ken Oosterbroek

Oosterbroek was shot and killed by peacekeepers in Thokoza township, about 25 km east of Johannesburg, on 18 April — days before the 1994 elections in South Africa, the country's first all-race elections. He and other photographers were covering a clash between peacekeepers and the African National Congress when the peacekeepers opened fire and shot Oosterbroek and fellow Bang-Bang Club member Greg Marinovich.

In July 1995, South Africa began a fifteen-month inquest into Oosterbroek's death. Despite overwhelming evidence and ballistics proving that only the peacekeepers were close enough to have shot and killed him, the magistrate ruled that no one could be found responsible for Oosterbroek's death. However, in January 1999, fellow photographer Greg Marinovich, a close friend of Ken's, had a chance meeting with one of the peacekeepers who had been fighting in Thokoza the day of Oosterbroek's death, Brian Mkhize. Although Mkhize initially claimed it must have been Inkatha supporters shooting from the hostel that were responsible, on 14 February 1999, he admitted that out of fear and panic, the peacekeepers had unthinkingly opened fire. He stated: "I think, somewhere, somehow... I think somewhere, one of us, the bullet that killed your brother — it came from us."

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Kevin Carter- life and death

Kevin Carter was an award-winning South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph depicting the 1993 famine in Sudan. He committed suicide at the age of 33.








He had started to work as a weekend sports photographer in 1983. In 1984, he moved on to work for the Johannesburg Star, bent on exposing the brutality of apartheid.
Carter was the first to photograph a public execution "necklacing" by black Africans in South Africa in the mid-1980s.

"The Boy who Became a Postcard"

In March 1993, while on a trip to Sudan, Carter was preparing to photograph a starving toddler trying to reach a feeding center when a hooded vulture landed nearby. Carter reported taking the picture, because it was his "job title", and leaving. He was told not to touch the children for fear of transmitting disease.

"He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle."

This picture earned Carter the 1994 Pullitzer Prize for feature photography. "I swear I got the most applause of anybody," Carter wrote back to his parents in Johannesburg. "I can't wait to show you the trophy. It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgment of my work I could receive." Carter's joy would not last.

Friends and colleagues would come to question why he had not done more to help the child in the photograph? "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering," said the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."


Burdened with feelings of guilt and sadness, Kevin Carter took his own life On July 27, 1994. His suicide note stated in part, "...I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children..."

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Greg Marinovich biography and achievements

Greg Marinovich, born in South Africa in 1962, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and is co-author of The Bang Bang Club, a non-fiction book on South Africa’s transition to democracy.

He has spent 18 years doing conflict, documentary and news photography around the globe.  His photographs have appeared in top international publications such as Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian of London, among others. He is chair of the World Press master Class nominating committee for Africa, and was a World Press Photo judge in 1994, as well as convenor of the FujiFilm awards in 2000.
April 1996 – Aug 1997: Chief Photographer, The Associated Press, Israel/Palestine.

1993 – 1996: Freelance photographer, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Associated Press. Worked in Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, India, Mozambique, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, Zaire.
1990 – 1992: Freelance photographer with the Associated Press, Sygma, The European, South African publications. Editor-at-Large and columnist at Living Africa, a general interest and lifestyles magazine. Worked in Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, South Africa, Yugoslavia.
1988 – 1990: Freelance photographer and writer specializing in social documentary and anthropology. Part-time copy editor at South African financial magazine.

Currently:

Photographing, making films and writing as a freelancer. Three book projects underway.  Recently finished as Editor-in-Chief of the World Press Photo and Lokaalmundial’s 2010 project, mentoring and training journalists, writers, photographers, radio journalists and multi-media practitioners from across Africa. Amazing project.

Exhibitions:

• ‘Prospects of Babel’ 2008, Bell Roberts Gallery, Cape Town
• ‘Almost Seen’ 2004 (Ghent, Belgium & Johannesburg)
• ‘The Conquered Land’ 2002 (Johannesburg)
• ‘AIDS’  2000  (Johannesburg)
• ‘blank___Architecture, apartheid and after’ (1999 Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Berlin 2000; Johannesburg 2000/20001)
• ‘Croatia’ 1993  (Johannesburg)
• ‘Bosnia & Croatia’  1993  (United Nations New York)
• ‘Somalia’ 1992  (Johannesburg)

Books:

• ‘Prospects of Babel’ 2008, edited a photographic book, with texts, on the DRC.
• ‘The Bang-Bang Club’ (with Joao Silva). Heinneman UK, 2000; Basic Books USA 2000, Grijalbo Spain 2001.
• ‘A Man’s Journey to Simple Abundance’ (a collection of essays). Scribner USA, 2000.
• ‘Prospects of Babel – new imagery from the Congo. 2008

Films:

Crime Special 1995
Produced a 5 minute insert on crime and community-based crime fighters fighting crime in Soweto. (CNN) Shembe 1998
Co-produced a 24 minute documentary on the staunchly traditionalist Zulu Nazareth Baptist Church in KwaZulu-Natal. (SABC 2) Ten Days in Afghanistan 1999
Produced and shot a 24 minute documentary/diary on the Afghans who are fighting against the Taliban.  Exclusive interview with the famous commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, among the last before his death. (e.tv) The Way of The Forefathers 2000
Produced, wrote and shot a 24 minute documentary about how anti-apartheid APLA guerillas infiltrated traditional BaSotho initiation schools in the struggle for freedom in South Africa. A remarkable tale of revolution, scientific socialism, war and magic. (SABC 2) Village of the Spirits 2001
Directed, & shot a 24 minute documentary (co-produced by Leonie Marinovich) on the demise of culture and traditional religion in Venda, and how others are struggling to revive the Venda ways. (SABC 2) Looking for Luck 2002
Directed, & shot a 24 minute documentary (co-produced by Leonie Marinovich) on one man’s search for good luck. Aphonso’s journey takes us through three religions and several cultures in South Africa and Mozambique. (SABC 2) The Lord’s Children 2004
Directed, & shot a 24 minute documentary (with Leonie Marinovich) on children in northern Uganda who have managed to escape brutal abduction by The Lord’s Resistance Army. The story is how the children – most forced to commit murder and torture – struggle to fit back into the very communities they terrorized. (SABC 2) small boys, big guns 2004
Directed a 24 minute documentary (shot by Leonie Marinovich) how the rebel child soldiers and their village militia opponents view their role in Sierra Leone’s shocking civil war. The third aspect of the film are the child victims who have had their hands amputated, and how they now cope. (SABC 2) Conversations with Goldblatt 2005
48′ minute documentary on South Africa’s most famous and internationally renowned photographer, David Goldblatt, as he embarks on a photographic journey across the South African hinterland. Goldblatt, 72 years old, was the first photographer to have an individual show at the Museum of Modern Art MOMA. (SABC 2) Njengue, Spirit of the Forest 2005
Directed and shot a 24 minute documentary on the Baka Pygmies of the Cameroon rain forests. The loss of the forest through logging directly affects the Baka belief system as there are scared places within the jungle where the forest Spriti Ndjenge lives. Can the Baka culture and religion survive the wholesale destruction of the forest? (SABC 2) Dancers of God 2005
Directed and shot a 24 minute documentary on the BaTwa Pygmies of Uganda. Having been forced to give way to wildlife conservationists, the Twa are now primarily beggars living on the margins of urban and village society.  The Twa balance between old and new as church groups seem to offer their only material salvation, but they must forego their forest religion. (SABC 2)

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