The Bang-Bang Club by Greg Marinovich

Author:Greg Marinovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

In New York, four years later, Nancy Lee, then The New York Times picture editor, bought me lunch and told me about how the vulture picture came to be published in the Times.

‘It all started when we were trying to illustrate a story out of the Sudan and it was really hard. Very few people got in. Nancy Buirski called around. She called you and you said Kevin had pictures.’

That phone call from The New York Times’s foreign picture editor Nancy Buirski had come late at night, waking me with its insistent ringing. There are few things I hate more than those late-night calls - people seem to ignore time differences, and I am partial to my sleep. Nancy Buirski wanted to know if, by any chance, I had recent pictures from Sudan. They were doing a story and needed to illustrate it. Their Nairobi correspondent had been in Juba when a food aid barge had arrived after 59 days of arduous and dangerous travel up the Nile. (It was the same barge Kevin had flown in to photograph, before he and Joao had both finally flown in to Ayod for those few, fateful hours.)

I told her that I had never been there, but that a friend of mine had returned from Sudan just a few days earlier with a great picture: an image of a vulture stalking a starving child who had collapsed in the sand. Was that the kind of thing they were interested in? From what had been a long-shot phone call, suddenly Nancy got excited. I gave her Kevin’s phone number. I had a strange feeling, a kind of jealousy, an envy, about introducing that picture to people. I, like many others, knew that it was going to be a massive picture and had been telling Kevin that, encouraging him to make the most of it, but when Nancy Buirski called me, I had a moment when I thought about not telling her of it. It was silly, and just a fleeting thought, maybe because he had shot it with a lens borrowed from me, maybe because I liked being the only South African Pulitzer-winner. In reality, I did not hesitate in telling her about Kevin’s vulture picture, but the selfishness of that short-lived, regretful thought has stayed with me, bothering me.

When that picture and a selection of others were finally transmitted to the Times, Nancy Buirski was waiting at the machine for it to roll off. Nancy Lee says she cannot forget the moment when she first saw the vulture picture - the Times, at that time, still had the old-style wire machine which would suddenly spit out prints, one at a time. Once she saw the picture, she instructed Buirski to make sure that Kevin not sell it to anyone else before they had published it.

Nancy Lee recalls that after the picture ran, people started calling. There was a lot of interest in what had happened to the girl. So she called Kevin and asked him.

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