The Bang-bang Club: The Making of the New South Africa

Synopsis

The Bang-Bang Club was a group of four young photographers, friends and colleagues, Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, who covered the last years of apartheid, taking many of the photographs that encapsulate the final years of white South Africa. Two of them won Pulitzer Prizes for individual photos. Ken, the oldest and a mentor to the others, died, accidentally shot while working; Kevin, the most troubled of the four, committed suicide weeks after winning his Pulitzer for a photograph of a starving baby in the Sudanese famine. Written by Greg and Joao, "The Bang-Bang Club" tells their stories, the story of four remarkable young men, the stresses, tensions and moral dilemmas of working in situations of extreme violence, pain and suffering, the relationships between the four and the story of the end of apartheid. This is an immensely powerful, riveting and harrowing book.