The Bang Bang Club Story Witness or a Voyeur

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Words: Marie-Amelie Marchal

The transition from Apartheid to democracy didn’t take place in one day. The period following Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 to the elections in 1994 was dominated by violence resulting from raging war between the Inkhata Freedom Party (IFP) and the African National Congress (ANC). Whilst most of the media, based their articles on police reports, there were a few journalists who had ‘first-hand’ experience of what was happening at the time. These journalists bravely protested and tried to awaken the world to the gruesome reality of the rivalry between these prominent political parties. This group of four young South African photo-journalists became known as ‘The Bang Bang Club’.

The Bang Bang Club comprised four members, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek and Joa Silva who went into the townships to both capture and denounce the violence that was rife in those areas at the time. They became famous for their bravery and the dangerous risks they took. At first, they were named by a local lifestyle magazine living as ‘The Bang Bang Paparazzi’, but Silva and Marinovich were offended and persuaded the editor, Chris Maris, to change their name before the article went to press into ‘The Bang Bang Club.’

About the members

Like his colleagues, Kevin Carter was a war photographer and is most well known for taking the picture of a little starving child with a vulture lurking nearby in Sudan. Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for this image in 1994, but killed himself later that same year after suffering from years of emotional trauma. Greg Marinovich worked for The New York Times while in South Africa and spent 18 years filming conflict documentaries around the world. He also won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News in 1991 for a series of pictures showing the brutal murder of a man alleged to be a Zulu spy. Currently, Marinovich is a photographer, film producer and freelance journalist.

Ken Oosterbroed was the chief photographer for The Star, a South African newspaper. He won a lot of prizes including the second World Press Photo prize in 1992 for General News stories. Oosterbroek took pictures in trains linking South Africa’s townships and central Johannesburg. These trains were violent places because people were often armed with knives or homemade weapons. In 1994, he was killed in a township during a clash between the ANC and a white militia group.

Joao Silva started taking pictures in 1989 for a local South African paper and worked for The Star in 1991. In 2011 a landmine in Afghanistan seriously injured Silva while he worked for The New York Times. But after reconstructive surgery, he went back to work for the paper and he is still a journalist.

Witnessing history first-hand

In 2000, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva co-authored The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, a novel based on their experiences as Bang Bang Club members. The book documented the many brutal scenes witnessed by the group, including how Kevin Carter became the first photographer to see the first known public execution by necklacing. The victim, Maki Skosana, had been accused of being a policeman’s girlfriend. Necklacing consists of putting a rubber tyre filled with petrol around someone’s neck and then setting it alight. In the book, Carter is quoted as saying ‘I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures; they created quite a stir. And then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a terrible thing to do.’ About the incident, Marinovich wrote ‘Her necklacing was the ritual, public execution of a person who had betrayed the community, a punishment reserved for those who collaborated with the state, traitors.’

All four members were close to the action and the two writers deal extensively with their feeling in the novel. They talk about a mix between voyeurism, guilt and the duty to inform. In really dangerous situations, their first thought was always how to get the right picture and how to survive, said Greg Marinovich.

Moreover, Joao Silva explains that it’s a passion to ‘witness history first-hand, to show the reality of a war zone’. They know that they don’t change the world but he said that if they can change one mind, something has been done. ‘We don’t change the world with pictures but we try to inform the world.’ he wrote.

The polemic on Kevin Carter

In March 1993, Kevin Carter was posted in Sudan to cover civil war and famine. While there, he took a picture of a starving toddler with a vulture close by. The picture won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. However, prior to that, the photograph was heavily criticised because of the sensitive nature of the scene and Carter was unable to defend himself when others asked him what he did to help the child. Carter committed suicide later that year and many publications blame the criticism from that photograph as the cause of his depression and suicide.

This picture received a lot of criticism and was believed to have led to Carter’s severe depression and ultimate suicide.

In 2011, however, a new point of view was raised about the photograph. A Spanish photojournalist, Alberto Rojas, who works for El Mundo – a Spanish daily newspaper – was intrigued by the picture and the polemic that followed. He went to Ayod, the city where the picture was taken – to find out what happened to the little girl in the photograph. Rojas contacted his friend, journalist Jose Maria Luis Arenzana, who was at the camp with Kevin Carter in 1993. Through his investigation, Rojas was able to track down the child’s father who pointed out that the child was actually a boy and that the plastic wristband on the child’s arm proves that an NGO supported the little child. Rajo also learned that the little boy did not die from starvation but from malaria at 14 years old. The father did not know about the photograph’s success.

Post Oosterbroek & Carter

After the death of their friends, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva were posted around the world as war photojournalists. Silva covered the Georgia War, the siege of Sadr City in Bagdad and the ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008 and became an embedded journalist – a journalist who joins the military camp to be in a war zone – following the US army in Afghanistan and Iraq. After he lost his legs in a landmine in Afghanistan, however, Silva took time out to recover but returned to journalism, unlike his former colleague, Marinovich, who quit the field after four injuries.

Witness or a voyeur?

The ethical question around war journalism is often what to do in situations such as Kevin Carter’s photo of the child and the vulture? Is it a journalist’s role to help people or to take pictures of people who need help? There is no right answer or no good ethic, according to journalists. On the other hand, they do create awareness about crucial problems.

Wen Marinovich took a picture of the alleged Zulu spy, Lindsay Tshabalala, he struggled with regret and the reason why he photographed this man’s murder. Marinovich wrote,

‘The fact I was winning prize for shooting Tshabalala’s gruesome death troubled me, but when I passed a huge newspaper billboard proclaiming “SA lensman Wins Pulitzer”. I could not but feel a surge of pride.’

The Bang Bang Club’s aim was to denunciate the violence in South Africa during the transition between apartheid and its first democracy and they risked their lives for this work. Even if the boundaries between journalism and voyeurism are still debated, there is no denying that powerful imagery can change minds. Marinovich wrote ‘ we were convinced that the only way to stop such killing was to show what those deaths looked like, what those daily body counts actually meant.’ In 2010, The Bang Bang Club movie was released based on the Marinovich and Silva book, honouring the memories of Kevin Carter and Ken Oosterbroek.

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