The Bang-Bang Club

The Bang-Bang Club was a group of four young war photographers, friends and colleagues: Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, and Joao Silva. They were war correspondents during the last years of apartheid and took many of the photographs that encapsulate the final violent years of racist white South Africa. Two of them won Pulitzer Prizes for individual photos. Ken, the oldest and a mentor to the others, died after being 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 uniquely powerful war stories. It narrates the experiences 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. An immensely powerful, riveting, and harrowing book, it is an invaluable contribution to the literary genre of war photography and an eye-opening read for fans of Susan Sontag.