A vulture looms over a wisp of a child, curled up and limp. It’s a striking image, taken during a Sudanese famine in the '90s; so striking that the photographer, Kevin Carter, won the Pulitzer Prize for taking it. Not long after, he committed suicide. Some say the horrors he witnessed abroad were responsible for the tragedy.
Before his death, Carter was criticized for opting to frame a photo rather than assist its starving subject. Questions were raised about the ethics of war reporting, not least among them: does raising awareness actually contribute to a solution?
In her new novel, The Small Backs of Children, Lidia Yuknavitch creates a similar character, a photographer who by chance snaps a perfectly emotive image of a girl in Eastern Europe, where there’s violence without war, persistent but unacknowledged elsewhere.
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