A vulture intentionally landed behind this girl; the photographer Kevin Carter scared it off.

No one knows what happened to the girl.

“The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted the photographer Kevin Carter to this emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away.

The UN started to distribute corn and women of the village came out of their wooden huts to meet the plane. The parents of the children were busy taking food from the plane so they had left their children only briefly while they collected the food. This was the situation for the girl in the photo taken by Carter. A vulture landed behind the girl. To get the two in focus, Carter approached the scene very slowly so as not to scare the vulture away and took a photo from approximately 10 metres. He took a few more photos and then the vulture flew off.”

A year later Carter’s suicide note read:
“I am depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken [recently deceased colleague Ken Oosterbroek] if I am that lucky.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Carter

Fantastic political blog with iconic images of human rights violations:
http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/category/photography-and-journalism/iconic-images-of-human-rights-violations/

Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography (since 1968):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Feature_Photography