Bang Bang, You're Dead

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 - 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 won a Pulizter Prize for a series of photographs of supporters of South Africa’s African National Congress burning alive a man they believed to be a Zulu spy.

“I had been too scared to say anything to try to stop it,” Mr. Marinovich said, “and so that really disturbed me about myself and who I thought I was at the moment.”

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 Pulizter Prize in 1994. The reaction to the picture was so strong that The Times published an unusual editors' note on the fate of the girl. Mr. Carter said she resumed her trek to the feeding center. He chased away the vulture. Afterward, he told an interviewer in April, he sat under a tree for a long time, "smoking cigarettes and crying."

"Kevin always carried around the horror of the work he did," his father, Jimmy Carter, told the South African Press Association.

Oosterbroek was killed in township violence just days before South Africa's historic panracial elections. Carter killed himself shortly afterwards. Another of their posse, Gary Bernard, who had held Oosterbroek as he died, also committed suicide.