Life Close to the Edge

A few days after his Pulitzer was announced in April, Mr. Carter was nearby when one of his closest friends and professional companions, Ken Oosterbroek, was shot dead photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township.

Friends said Mr. Carter was a man of tumultuous emotions, which brought passion to his work but also drove him to extremes of elation and depression. He often told friends if he had not become a photographer he would have been a race car driver, because he enjoyed living close to the edge.

Last year, saying he needed a break from South Africa's turmoil, he paid his own way to the southern Sudan to photograph a civil war and famine he felt the world was overlooking.

His picture of an emaciated girl collapsing on the way to a feeding center, as a plump vulture lurked in the background, was published first in The New York Times and The Mail & Guardian, a Johannesburg weekly. Later it was displayed in many other publications as a metaphor for Africa's despair.

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.