Don't Waste Food : The vulture and the little girl by Kevin Carter

Kevin Carter's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a starving Sudanese girl (about 8 years old) and a vulture in the background.

This is my most successful image after 10 years of taking pictures, but I do not hang it on my wall. I hate it.- Kevin Carter

In 1993, during the second Sudanese civil war, the country was hit by famine, forcing more than a million people into starvation in South Sudan. The United Nations and other relief agencies had set up camps for the refugees. In March 1993, Kevin Carter made a trip to South Sudan. During his trip, he found a weakened famine-stricken little girl, who was struggling to crawl to the feeding center set up by the United Nations but had to stop to rest. The parents of the girl were busy taking food from the same United Nations plane on which Carter had flown into Ayod. A vulture meanwhile landed behind the child. To get both into the focus and not to scare the vulture, Carter approached the scene very slowly and waited for 20 minutes hoping that the bird would spread its wings. The vulture did not spread its wings but Carter photographed the scene from 10 metres (33 ft) away. Carter then chased the bird away and left.

Carter did not touch the child since photojournalists were "told not to touch famine victims for fear of spreading disease". Carter had also estimated that people were dying at the rate of twenty per hour at the food center and regarded the girl and her condition as unexceptional.