Some years ago I saw an exhibition at Fabrica in Brighton that has stayed with me in various ways ever since. Seeing ‘Infidel’ at FOAM in September put me in mind of it once again, possibly because the lives of both photographers were cut short by their work with their cameras and what they observed as a result.

At Fabrica I saw Alfredo Jaar’s installation the ‘Sound of Silence’ – it included one image by Kevin Carter, a vulture and a small emaciated child. The image gained Kevin Carter a Pulitzer prize, and while now archetypal, it also caused significant controversy.

He positioned himself for the best possible image. He waited 20 minutes. He was hoping the vulture would spread its wings. But it did not. He took his photographs. And chased the bird away. He watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. He sat under a tree and lit a cigarette. Talked to God. And cried. Kevin. Kevin.

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.

As Gilane Tawadros said of the piece at Fabrica:

When you entered Jaar’s installation, you entered a story: a story about an individual photograph and its impact but also a story about representation and its unequal effects. As the artist said: “It is a lamentation. It’s a poem that asks about ethics of what we (photojournalists) do when we shoot pain.”

I think it is also testimony to the power of story and how stories seem to build lives of their own as they connect us. This is a theme that has been coming up for me a lot recently and is something I hope to explore further with both my photography and my blog posts.