Kevin Carter, a Pulitzer Winner For Sudan Photo, Is Dead at 33

Kevin Carter, the South African photographer whose image of a starving Sudanese toddler stalked by a vulture won him a Pulitzer Prize this year, was found dead on Wednesday night, apparently a suicide, the police said today. He was 33.

The police said Mr. Carter's body and several letters to friends and family were discovered in his pickup truck, parked in a Johannesburg suburb. They said an inquest showed he died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Mr. Carter began his work as a sports photographer in 1983, but soon moved to the front lines of South African political strife, recording images of repression, anti-apartheid protest and fratricidal violence for several South African newspapers and more recently as a freelance photographer.

He was arrested several times for violating a South African ban on reporting of the domestic conflict.

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.

The Horror of the Work

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 tonight.

Mr. Carter was born in Johannesburg on Sept. 13, 1960. He began as a freelance photographer for The Sunday Express, a tabloid that is now defunct, and moved in 1984 to South Africa's largest daily newspaper, The Star, in Johannesburg.

He worked as chief photographer at The Sunday Tribune and started the photo department at The Daily Mail in 1990. He remained with The Mail when it reverted to a weekly format, and last year began full-time work for Reuters.

Mr. Carter is survived by his parents, a 6-year-old daughter, and two sisters.